Huawei Ascend P6

The Thinnest Phone, Huawei Ascend P6 with Stock Android

After Samsung and HTC bring us Google Play edition of S4 and HTC with Google, and now Huawei together with Google gonna launch the Ascend P6 for Google Play edition too.
The biggest feature of Huawei is its appearance with just 6.15mm of thickness.
The P6 has a 4.7” 720P display, 1.5GHz quad-core processor, 2GB RAM, 8MP camera and 2000mAh battery.

Huawei Ascend P6: Review

Take a very quick glance at the new slim smartphone from Huawei and you could be forgiven for thinking it’s an iPhone as it has the same flat glass front with aluminium edge. It even has the same black stripe breaking up the aluminium band. But then look at the base of the phone and you’ll see a different design from the top. Here the edge curves over.

Look more closely and you can see more differences: that black band is exactly flush with the metal on the iPhone whereas on the Ascend P6 it juts out a little. Still, both bands relate to the aerial. On the iPhone it goes all the way round while the Huawei has a C shaped antenna that sits on the top of the phone.

It looks way more expensive than it is. After all, this is a very competitively priced phone, much cheaper than the handsets it’s trying to emulate like the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S4.

Huawei Ascend P6: Design and build

The P6 is much thinner than the iPhone, even the latest model. After all, this is the thinnest smartphone in the world, Huawei says. How long it holds the title is anybody’s guess, but as Sony has already announced a 6.4-inch screened Xperia Z Ultra which is 6.5mm thick, it can’t be that long. This phone is called the P6 because it’s 6mm thick. Actually, it’s 6.18mm but the Ascend P6.18 isn’t as catchy a name.

The design is decent enough, though there’s something odd about a phone with differently styled ends. And the build quality isn’t bad but lacks the luxuriousness of rivals like the HTC One. Like many high-end smartphones, it’s a sealed unit with the battery tucked safely inside. To access the SIM card slot and microSD card, you need to pop open the relevant side drawer.

To assist with this, Huawei has supplied a tool. This sits in the headphone socket. Which is handy, until you lose it – and that may not take long. If you don’t plan to change the microSD card very often, I’d recommending keeping this somewhere safe or reconcile yourself to losing it and having to manage with a paper clip.

But above all, the abiding feeling about this phone is its remarkable catwalk-thin design. Any thinner may feel too fragile to be useful – this feels like it’s on the cusp.

Huawei Ascend P6: Display and features

The Ascend P6 has everything you’d expect from a smartphone: GPS, Wi-Fi, camera, NFC and so on. The only feature missing, and you can decide if this matters, is 4G. For now, if you’re not with EE then this is no great problem. But in the next couple of months every network will have 4G up and running, so you may feel a bit left out. Still, as Huawei wanted to make this a high-end phone at a mid-range price, this was a wise corner to cut.

After all, usually with lower-priced phones companies go for older versions of Android or a slow processor. This phone has Jelly Bean version 4.2.2 and a quad-core 1.5GHz processor, which are more than satisfactory. Talking of Android, Huawei has skinned it with its own, slightly quirky style. So apps are collected together in folders such as one that has Google Apps in it. This means you may have to dig them out of the Huawei-constructed folders to find the ones you want.

The Huawei take also involves a Me widget which you can customise as you wish to include important contacts, music player, weather and more. It looks nice but whether it will really become a key part of your phone use is another matter.

The Chinese company is eager to make its mark with themes, too. So instead of just the half dozen wallpaper backgrounds most Android phones muster, there are 1,000 here. Well, technically they’re all on the internet to be downloaded apart from four on the phone, but you can theoretically have a phone that looks different every day for almost three years. In all likelihood people will find a few they like and stick with one.

The 4.7-inch display isn’t Full HD (it’s 720p HD), though at 312 pixels per inch it’s a match for the iPhone’s Retina display. It looks pin-sharp and detailed, though it doesn’t quite equal the vivid, contrasty effect of the Nokia Lumia 925 display. Not bad, though.

Huawei Ascend P6: Cameras

Usually we’d just be talking about one camera, the rear one with all the megapixels. But Huawei has taken care of both front and back cameras. The rear one is 8MP but has automatic modes which are designed to carefully understand the lighting situation and adjust with great dexterity to those. In practice, shots were good but didn’t seem to outrank those from the iPhone 5 or quite match the excellent camera on the Nokia Lumia 925.

But it’s the front camera that’s more interesting, offering a 5MP resolution. This is way more than on any other phone and is designed to create great self-portraits. To this end there’s a beauty level setting on the screen. Slide the button from 0 to 10 to improve the image – that’s the theory though in practice 10 is just very soft focus. Still, sometimes that’s just what you want.

Huawei Ascend P6: Verdict

This is a superbly slim phone that is good-looking and pleasantly lightweight – the world’s slimmest don’t forget.

It comes with a decent camera on the back that takes good shots with minimal fuss. And the front camera is designed for self-portraits so it’s higher-resolution than rivals and has a beauty level slider to improve shots while they’re still on the phone.

Huawei’s take on Android won’t be to everyone’s taste and mostly consists of a customisable widget and 1,000 themes to choose from, plus a slightly unusual series of folders that contain apps that Huawei has lumped together.

But the key thing here is the phone’s price which is noticeably lower than rivals. And few corners have been cut, most notably 4G, the absence of which may not be an issue for you. Its thinness means it may not feel quite as sturdy as an iPhone 5 or HTC One. Even so, this is a neat, high-fashion phone at a TK Maxx price.