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Huawei Ascend Mate: The phondleslab for the skint

Good screen, decent performance, nice price

One-handed compliments

Where Huawei has been rather more clever is with the Mate’s keyboard. You can opt for a two-thirds keyboard that can be positioned to the left or the right which means you can reach all the keys with the thumb of the hand you are holding your Mate with. The phone dialler performs the same trick. It may not be pretty, but it is effective. It’s just a shame that the control to change the keyboard layout from full to two-thirds width is in the settings menu rather than being on the keyboard itself.

Huawei Ascend Mate

The buttons on the are well placed

I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that these two modifications make the Mate as easy to use single-handedly as a Samsung Galaxy S4 or Sony Xperia Z, but it’s good to see a manufacturer thinking of ways to make a VLP less of an, ahem, handful.

Another handy software feature is the option to retract the on-screen Android navigation buttons so you can free up the entire screen and avoid accidental Back/Home/Google Now activations while gaming. Make an up-swipe gesture from the bottom of the screen and the buttons reappear.

There is one small bug on the software front, though. Like many Android phones coming out of China, the gallery doesn’t connect to Picasa, forcing you to use Google+. But if you update the Google+ app on the Mate it refuses to launch – so you have to uninstall the latest updates and set your app manager so that it doesn't automatically update your apps. That’s not really good enough.

Huawei Ascend Mate

The small phone dialler and the one-handed keyboard tweaks are handy

Some people may complain that the screen is only 1280 X 720 rather than the full 1080 banana, but at the price it seems a reasonable compromise. The pixel density of 241dpi is still better than the original Nexus 7, which is a reasonable visual benchmark in these matters.

Being IPS+ LCD rather than Plain Jane TFT, the screen performs well. Contrast, viewing angles, colour saturation and brightness are all what I’d describe as above average. You can even adjust the colour temperature. The Mate’s display, then, is better than the Mega 6.3’s, which is far from bad itself, and it supports gloves-on fondling.

The Mate’s photographic credentials are less impressive. The 8MP main camera is very ordinary and on a par with the camera fitted to my Motorola Razr i, a handset not renowned for its photographic prowess. The HDR mode and the ability to record video at 1080p are the imaging high points, though the 1MP webcam is pretty decent and can record video at 720p. It’s a little annoying that the main camera lacks tap-to-focus or simultaneous still and video shooting, though.

Huawei Ascend Mate

Come up to the lab and see what’s on the slab

Wireless connectivity is also pretty middle-of-the-road so you get 42/5.7Mbps 3G, dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 but no LTE and no NFC. The micro USB port supports On-The-Go hosting but not MHL video output. Signal reception was solid, as was call quality, helped by a noise-cancelling second microphone. Speaker performance was excellent in terms of both volume and quality helped by built-in Dolby sound processing.

The Mate’s ace in the hole is battery life. Looping a 720p video drained the battery in just over 12 hours 30, 90 minutes better than the Mega 6.3 managed thanks to an extra 950mAh of capacity. Dial down the screen brightness and you can easily get two days and then some from a full charge.

The Reg Verdict

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. ®

Huawei Ascend Mate

Huawei Ascend Mate: The phondleslab for the skint

Large phone, small tablet with a decent spec for the low price.
Price: £340 (Sim-free). Free on £25pcm contract RRP

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