Huawei Ascend Mate Pro Reviews

At times, the Ascend Mate comes across as a two-sided smartphone. There's the would-be flagship, with a big screen and even bigger battery life. If you value those two factors above others, you may have found an ideal mobile companion: the Mate outperforms the Galaxy Note II and Optimus G Pro on both those fronts, and it may outlast the Galaxy Mega 6.3 on battery tests, too. The Ascend Mate breaks away from the pack on software. While we frequently prefer the stock Android interface, Huawei has shaped its Emotion UI into a truly unique and at times superior experience, as long as you don't mind that missing app drawer. The other half is classic Huawei: that is, it's a budget-conscious device that undercuts its pricier competition. For all of the Ascend Mate's outward trappings of greatness, it's really a frugal phone on the inside with an older processor, 3G-only data, modest storage and mostly recycled camera technology. That's more than acceptable for those who mainly care about battery life and screen size, but these design sacrifices prevent the Mate from being the best in its class. We also want to see how the Galaxy Mega 6.3 stacks up in comparison. After all, Samsung's incoming gigantophone has LTE, a 16GB storage option and a more mature (if sometimes criticized) software bundle. As such, the Ascend Mate makes the most sense if you can get one for a significantly lower price than its competitors. The good news is that you can, depending on where you live. As of this writing, a store like Expansys UK sells the Ascend Mate for £335 ($508), a full £110 less than the £445 ($674) Galaxy Note II. In Huawei's native China, it's an even cheaper ¥2,688 ($438). Americans won't save as much over a Galaxy Note II (it's just a $55 difference at Expansys), but the phone is still one of the least expensive in its category -- especially if you're measuring the cost per screen inch. We've come to enjoy using the Ascend Mate, but we also accept that it's a specialized tool, not a jack of all trades.

For the money, the Ascend Mate is not at all a bad device. The screen is good, the price is right – Vodafone is offering it for £25 a month with nothing down, and you can pick unlocked examples up for under £340 – battery life excellent and there are some interesting VLP software optimisations like the two-thirds keyboard. And while made predominantly of plastic, it still manages to look and feel rather more upmarket than the Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3. Performance isn’t bad either, though I don’t see Huawei’s K3V2 chipset keeping the folk at Nvidia or Qualcomm awake at night. Shame about that Google+ bug though.

Let's not forget the Huawei Ascend Mate was announced in Q1 and it's only logical for more recent gadgets to outdo it in terms of specs. It still looks like Huawei are doing most things right - the Mate is a well-balanced package and the price is hard to beat. Battery life - harder still. Sensible styling meets adequate equipment, and there's a key selling feature to nudge fence-sitters. There's little more to ask for in the phablet midrange.

Right now the Huawei Ascend Mate delivers a better bang for the buck. Finding it hard to match Huawei's price, Samsung responds with better equipment for the Galaxy Mega 6.3. A classic case of using aggressive pricing to compete against a stronger brand, these two phablets allow a very reasonable choice between budget and comfort.

With a 6.1-inch display, the Huawei Ascend Mate is the largest smartphone yet to run our test course. With its imposing screen diagonal, the price of about 400 Euros (~$521) is not draining at all for such a device. The Ascend Mate is so impressive through its very high luminance, which very few other smartphones can overtake and which allows users to use it outdoors in spite of the reflective IPS panel. In addition, there is the large viewing angle of the display and its precise and speedy reaction. In spite of its huge measurements, the case of the Huawei is very stable and allowed practically no twisting or deforming. As it is equipped with 4.1 Jelly Bean and thus a current version of Android, the user can classify the Ascend Mate as either smartphone or tablet, since it can be used for either. Those who like to play smartphone games will be pleased with the powerful quad-core processor, and the large screen is ideal for watching HD videos. In addition, the Huawei is also fast in web browsing - for example, it can support up to 21 Mbit/s over UMTS network. In the end, there are only two areas where the Huawei smartphone is not so impressive. Those would be the completely average image quality of the integrated cameras and the occasional soft background noise that we heard when phoning a landline, regardless of where we were standing. Altogether, the Ascend Mate imparts a really good attitude and is a looker with definitely more to offer than just a large display.

The Huawei Ascend Mate tries hard to be a tablet and a phone at the same time, and for the most part, it manages to do so. It's certainly big enough to be usable as a tablet, and though it is slightly unwieldy to use as a phone due to its size, its light weight helps it stay manageable. It could be argued that the resolution of the device could be more suited to a smaller screen size, that Huawei could have increased the pixel density when it initially designed the phablet, but it ultimately doesn't really matter for the most part. The rest of the phone, namely its audio performance, generally acceptable performance and serviceable camera, is more than adequate for a mid-range smartphone. The unexpectedly absent app tray and tiny amount of free storage space, while they are big down sides to the device, can easily be worked around by the more resourceful or determined user. If a frugal person is looking towards saving money by buying a phablet instead of a separate phone and tablet, they will care about the screen, and anything else that happens to be decent is a nice bonus on top.

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.

At this size, the Mate won't be for everyone. You're going to need to really want a massive handset and you're going to need to think about the practicalities of owning such a big phone. And on the downside, the screen resolution isn't that great but for the most part, it didn't trouble us. The only problem is, some things do look a little soft on the display, but this never gave us real problems in real-world testing and we say it's nothing to worry about. Aside from that though, the build quality is great, that built-in battery is pretty epic at 4050mAh and we can't see anyone complaining it doesn't see them through the day. The phone is powerfully enough to play most games and the on-board storage - at 8GB - is enough to get started. With microSD cards costing so little now, expanding your phone to 32GB need cost no more than £20. So with everything considered, the price, the brilliance of the phone in general, we have to say the Mate has earned our respect. We liked it from the moment we took it out of the box, and it just kept impressing us. This is one of Huawei's finest, and we hope it does more like this.