Huawei Ascend Mate Review

Introduction

Barring the Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3, the Huawei Ascend Mate would have been in a league of its own. The League of Extraordinary Diagonals, that is, as the phone sports a monster 6.1” display. Huawei's largest handset, however, certainly has enough going for it to set it apart from Samsung's Goliaths, like stereo sound recording and the largest battery ever placed in a smartphone – a capacious 4050 mAh unit.

Thanks to the on-screen navigational buttons, it also sports "a screen-to-body ratio of 73% – the highest in the industry," though the Sony Xperia ZL would beg to disagree.

Are these making it a better handset than the other big-screen lover dream phones, like the Mega 6.3, Note II or G Pro? Read on our review to find out...

In the box:

• In-ear stereo headphones
• Wall charger
• microUSB cable
• Manual

Design

The phone can be considered compact for its screen size, thanks to the on-screen navigation buttons, and the 163.5 mm x 85.7 mm x 9.9 mm (6.5" x 3.4" x 0.4") chassis. It is quite shorter and more narrow than the Mega 6.3, but still feels no less awkward to hold than Samsung's largest, despite the tapered back that goes to mere 6.5mm by the edges. Thankfully, the obligatory one-hand phablet UI is here, too, cramping the keyboard and dialpad left or right so you can reach them with your thumb without being Shaq, aiding one-handed usage.



Build quality is decent, but the choice of plastics feels a bit cheap – the soft-touch coating on the back is very grippable, so it does the job, but its quality doesn't leave the same premium feel that other such soft layers leave in the hand. Same goes for the rim surrounding the sides, which has a coarse-feeling surface, aiding the grip further, but spoiling the looks somewhat. Huawei says the phone has a dual antenna design, and there are two notches cut in the side rim, which could mark an external antenna design, like on the iPhone and Nokia Lumia 925.


The side rim is also interrupted by protective flaps in the same color, which cover the microSD and SIM card slots, as the phone is unibody, with sealed battery compartment. The power/lock key on the right, and the volume rocker underneath it are well-situated, and easy to feel and press, with good tactile feedback.


Display

The whole front is recessed quite a bit, leaving a protective frame around the display part, so as it doesn't scratch when placed face down, or doesn't shatter into pieces from the slightest contact with the ground.

Apparently Huawei couldn't ring the manufacturer which produces Full HD displays at that size, and had to make do with 720x1280 pixels HDresolution for the 6.1” IPS screen, which still leaves it at a decent 241ppi pixel density. The screen also sports the "Magic Touch" tech, allowing you to use it with gloves on, which can be turned on and off from the settings menu, and it works as advertised, allowing you to answer a call with your mittens on, for instance.

The color representation can be changed with a slider in the display settings menu, too, ranging from warm to cold, and is set in the middle by default, though the difference is mild unless you are a screen purist. Being an IPS display, the Ascend Mate panel flaunts very good viewing angles, with only a shift in brightness and contrast at extreme angles.

Peak brightness is about 400 nits, the LCD average, meaning that you will have issues outside under direct sunlight, though the phone sports pretty good coating, diminishing the unpleasant effect of mirror reflections when a light source falls on the screen directly.


Interface and functionality

First thing you notice about Huawei's Emotion UI overlay on top of Android 4.1.2, is that it does away with the archaic app drawer, and centers everything around the homescreens. The widgets are compact, with minimized border distance, so you can fit a lot of them on one screen. The apps are neatly tucked into categorized folders on the next screen, the third houses the apps you download, and so on.


Another great feature is the ability to hide and show the on-screen navigation bar at will, with a small arrow on the left, and flicking your finger up from the bottom of the screen, whichever app you are into.


The other nice idea are the so-called Profiles, with their own switch in the notification bar toggles. A ring dialer appears when you press it, and you can choose from several presets like Work, Home, Sleep, Normal, Outdoors and so on. Each profile can have a smorgasbord of settings for everything – from sounds volume through display options to connectivity choices, and you can add and tinker with your own, or make them automatically swap at a given time.


There's an abundance of launcher themes as well, plus ways to customize your current theme manually. In short, the Ascend Mate is graced with a neat and functional Emotion interface that would barely make you look for another launcher in the Play Store.



Processor and memory

The upside of the "mere" HD resolution is that there aren't as many pixels to push for the GPU, and a second-gen homebrew 1.5 GHz quad-core Hi-Silicon K3V2 processor is powering the handset, which puts it somewhere in the golden middle of benchmarks.

The subjective feeling when strolling the interface or going in and out of apps is that the chipset is fast enough, and we didn't notice lag or stuttering. Huawei has had the decency to put 2 GB of RAM into the Ascend Mate, but only provides 8 GB of internal storage, only three of which are user-available, but there is a memory card slot for expansion, so no biggie.

	Quadrant Standard	AnTuTu	GLBenchmark 2.5 (Egypt HD)	Vellamo (HTML5 / Metal)
Huawei Ascend Mate	5195	15615	n/a	1626 / 469
Samsung Galaxy Note II	5806	18295
LG Optimus G Pro	12239

The downside of homemade chipsets us that the processor might not support instructions optimized for the more popular chips like Qualcomm's Snapdragon family or Samsung's Exynos, so benchmark apps that are written to use Qualcomm's set of instructions might be an issue. We ran GLBenchmark, for instance, and the phone froze midway, then reset iself. We ran it for a second time, and the handset froze completely, going into a coma for a few minutes and no key press or combination of keys could take it out, until it resurrected from the dead all by itself after pressing the power key for the umpteenth time.

Internet and connectivity

The default Ascend Mate browser is pretty barebones as interface, but renders pages well, and has the added benefit of supporting sideloaded Adobe Flash, so you won't be left out when you come across a piece of the Web which needs Flash to run. Needless to say, browsing on the 6.1” display is a joy, despite the average pixel density, due to the sheer screen size.


The phone is pentaband HSPA phone, meaning that it supports all major frequency bands, so you can use it on both AT&T and T-Mobile in the US, for example, as well as Europe and Asia for international travelers. Huawei touts that the dual-antenna design supports high power data transmission and is optimized with ratio combining methods to increase network reception by up to 2.5dB, hence provide an increase of 20 to 30% of overall network coverage.

There is also Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, A-GPS and FM radios, plus Wi-Fi Direct and DLNA wireless streaming. The bottom port is regular microUSB, no additional MHL functionality.

Camera

The camera app interface that governs the 8 MP shooter on the back is comparatively simple, with a few basic shooting modes like Panorama, HDR, low light and burst shot, plus a couple of color and “laughing mirror” effects. Nothing fancy, but most stuff you might need is there.


Pictures from the Ascend Mate, however, come out overly soft at the edges, with sharp focus at the center only, which could indicate a low-quality lens issue. We wish it captured a bit more detail. Color representation is otherwise decent, and there generally aren't any glaring issues with white balance metering or exposure compensation.


Video is recorded in 1080p with smooth 30fps, and exhibits good image quality when there is enough light around. Indoors at low light settings it becomes extremely noisy, though.

Huawei Ascend Mate Sample Video:



Huawei Ascend Mate Indoor Sample Video:



The Huawei Ascend Mate, however, is of the very few phones that can record stereo sound with its two noise-canceling microphones. Because of the phone's size, their locations leave an abundance of space in-between, which makes for a very good stereo recording, though still not of the rank that comes with the Nokia 808 PureView, for instance.

Multimedia

The typical grid thumbnail view in the gallery is about all you get, with no fancy pinching rearrangements, and the picture editing options are more limited than what we are used to see recently, though the basic features like cropping, resizing and adding a few effects, are covered.


The music player is pretty basic visually, too, with the obligatory tune categorization by artists, albums and genres, as well as album art depiction. There are no built-in equalizer presets, but the Dolby Mobile faux surround sound button makes a difference when turned on, and the loudspeaker churns out pretty strong and clear sounding beats.



The Ascend Mate plays most popular video formats thrown at it out of the box, including DivX/Xvid files up to 1080p definition out of the box.



Call quality

Voices sound loud and clear in the earpiece, very recognizable, with only a slight distortion at the highest volume. The two noise-canceling mics do a great job at weeding out background fluff and relayed our voices with strength and clarity that are way above average for the category.

Battery

Besides the largest stock battery capacity that has ever graced a smartphone, the 4050 mAh unit in the Huawei Ascend Mate features the fast charging option that some handsets now ship with, which pumps it full of electrons in a much shorter amount of time than your typical handset battery.

Huawei claims that with normal usage the battery should be able to drive you through a full weekend out and about, which is a pretty commendable achievement.

Conclusion

With big-screen handsets, the game is to replace your phone, tablet, laptop, camera and so on, with one converging device, but we'll leave to Mr Market to decide whether this can be done via a 6.1" smartphone successfully enough.

On the plus side, Huawei has equipped the Ascend Mate with the largest stock battery in a smartphone at 4050 mAh, so that you can keep watching movies on the plane for 10 hours straight. Not only that, but the phone is an all-around quality package for the sub-$500 price, with its stereo sound recording, great call quality, super-sensitive display and pentaband radio. The only gripe with the phone, if you love'em big screens, is the camera, as the lens seem unable to produce a well-focused image anywhere but in the center of the frame.

Direct competitors are phones like the Galaxy 6.3 and 5.8, but the larger one here comes more expensive, and the only advantage before the Ascend Mate is the comparatively sleeker design. Of course, for a Benjamin more you can get the wildly popular and slightly smaller Galaxy Note II, but if you are into the largest screen possible in the most manageable size out there, Huawei Ascend Mate can't be beat.



Software version: MT1-U06100R001C00B110