SAMSUNG GALAXY EXPRESS REVIEW

When carriers offer a smartphone for free (or $1) on contract it often means that the device has some problems. It’s usually a warning sign to steer clear. That’s not always the case, though. Samsung’s Galaxy Express on AT&T is one of those nice, cheap exceptions to the rule. This compact 4.5-inch handheld has a lot going for it: good display, nice design, and decent camera. Plus, it runs Android 4.1. If you really want a smartphone but really can’t afford to plunk down $100 or even $50 to buy one, the Galaxy Express is worth a look.

Look and feel

The Galaxy Express is basically a smaller version of the Galaxy S3, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s light, slim, and comfortable to hold with a great screen. It’s better for people who have smaller hands or want a phone that is more easily used with one hand than the S3 or S4. Just like the flagship Galaxy S phones, the Express has a physical Home button flanked by capacitive Menu and Back buttons, a Micro USB port on the bottom, and the Power button and Volume rocker on the right and left sides. That placement can get a little awkward since it’s easy to accidentally press one of them while going for the other, but overall the Express is well designed. It also looks pretty good and doesn’t feel cheap despite the plastic casing. Under the removable back you get access to the battery, SIM, and microSD slot.

The 4.5-inch display isn’t exactly small, though it doesn’t make the phone itself feel huge at all. Instead, it feels more like a 4.3-inch, medium-sized phone; the extra fractions of an inch aren’t that noticeable, especially with a 800 x 480 pixel resolution. That’s nowhere near full HD but that’s fine for a handset that’s free. The Super AMOLED Plus display is at least bright and viewable in sunlight. Even with the lower resolution, icon edges are relatively sharp. Where you’ll notice the difference is in small text and high-resolution images, which can look pixilated. Viewing angles are wide enough that we didn’t notice any color or brightness distortion when playing games. At extreme angles the screen darkens, but in most use cases you won’t encounter this.

Android and Apps

As with all Samsung Galaxy phones, the Express runs Android 4.1 (which is 1 version off from being up to date), but the interface doesn’t look like Google intended. Samsung has its own extensive user interface/skin called TouchWiz. The TouchWiz skin offers some nice additions to Android and makes it a little easier to use for novices, though we’re not fond of the toy-like look or how it makes a few things more difficult (like creating a folder). We do like the toggles in the Notification shade and the timesaving features like Motion gestures. The feature set is just right for an inexpensive phone, even if it isn’t as extensive as the Galaxy S3.

Pre-loaded apps include a few from Samsung and a ton from AT&T. We appreciate Samsung’s MyFiles, the enhanced Clock app, and the MediaHub for music. Samsung Link is for connecting Galaxy devices with other Samsung devices, such as laptops and smart TVs and sharing the screen. S Voice, Samsung’s Siri competitor, is also on board. The voice prompts for S Voice aren’t as conversational as Siri’s, but the service is improving overall.

AT&T pre-loaded a lot of apps (12) onto the Galaxy Express. Some are necessary and useful, such as My AT&T, AT&T Family Map, and DriveMode. However, do we need two messaging apps (Messaging and Messages)? And there’s little need to pay for Navigator when Google offers that service for free; same with Locker. At least you can hide some of these apps you’ll never use.

Cameras

The 5-megapixel camera on the back takes surprisingly good pictures for an inexpensive phone. Outdoor shots are colorful and mostly accurate and the camera app includes several useful scene modes to help you get the best shot. Unfortunately, HDR is not included, so stay away from mixed shadow/bright light situations. Indoor shots have more noise and since the shutter isn’t very fast the pictures aren’t very crisp, especially the low-light ones. All of the resulting images are good enough for sharing online and on social networks, but they won’t look great when printed.

The front-facing camera is crisp enough for video chats and the occasional selfie and does a slightly better job of pulling in light for evening or night shots than your average low-budget phone.

Specs and Performance

Inside the Galaxy Express is a 1.5-GHz dual-core Qualcomm processor, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage. This combo scored 5,106 on the Quadrant benchmark, around the same as the Galaxy S3 and a little less than the Pantech Discover. Our hands-on testing matches this – we found the Express snappy and smooth when doing everything from reading email to playing games. Even with quad-core phones dominating the horizon, it will likely be several years before you run into apps that are too much for a dual-core phone to handle, and many of those will be games.

The 8GB of internal storage isn’t much, especially for media hounds; good thing there’s a microSD slot that takes up to 32GB cards.

It’s light, slim, and comfortable to hold with a great screen.

Connectivity includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, DLNA, NFC, and GPS. The Express is a quad-band GSM world phone with LTE capability. We saw very good speeds on LTE in New York City. SpeedTest.net recorded download speeds in excess of 20Mbps and upload speeds around 12Mbps even when the phone only showed three or four bars.

Call quality on our end was very clear through the earpiece. Whether talking to people on landlines or cell phones their voices came through sans static and we didn’t experience any dropped calls. Our voice didn’t always come through clearly on the other end, especially with medium background noise. The speaker on the back pumped loud volume for speaker calls and music, though the quality is tinnier and harsher than we’d like.

Battery Life

Since the 2,000mAh battery doesn’t have to power a high-resolution screen it’s no surprise that battery life is great. Even with heavy usage, we were able to get over 12 hours of use out of the Express without employing any battery saving tricks. This included long gaming sessions, watching video, talking for an hour, and lots of background downloading from email and social networking apps.

Conclusion

For a $1 smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy Express is fantastic. You get a decent display, comfortable and attractive design, good performance, and speedy 4G LTE. If you’re on a tight budget and really need to get a phone for next to nothing, the Express is not a bad choice. It’s not as great as the Galaxy S3 (now just $100 on contract), but is definitely better than its price would suggest.

Highs

• As powerful as a Galaxy S3
• Compact, lightweight design
• Bright, colorful display
• Long battery life

Lows

• Too many AT&T apps
• Low screen resolution
• Poor speaker quality

Nokia Asha 501 review

As it continues its fight to regain its place in the smartphone segment, it is Nokia’s feature phone segment that is keeping it afloat. Nokia’s Asha series is wildly popular and with the Nokia Asha 501, the Finnish manufacturer is all set to disrupt the market once again. We’ve previously done a quick hands onwith the device but we finally got to spend some time with the handset. Is it worth the hype ? Read on to find out.

Design
The Nokia Asha 501 is an extremely compact device and weighs in under 100grams. Compared to the trend of giant sized phones, the Asha 501 comes as a refreshing change and fits very comfortably in the palm of your hand.

Nokia has adopted a brand new yet familiar design language for the Asha 501. The bright colors and matte finish give it a very upmarket appeal compared to the glossy, plasticky handsets seen in the category.

Over on the front is a 3 inch screen that might appear small to some. A fairly large amount of bezel can be seen around the handset. The screen is of the capacitive variety and is quite responsive. You don’t get Gorilla Glass here but it does have a scratch resistant coating. The phone lacks a brightness sensor but does have a proximity sensor.

A back button is placed below the display while an earpiece is located above the screen. The back button provides a reassuring click and has good tactile feedback. A microphone port is located at the bottom right corner.

Over at the back is the 3.15 MP camera lens surrounded in an island of sorts. Next to the camera is the Nokia logo. The entire backplate can be easily removed and forms a slim frame around the screen which provides contrast to the black front.

A power button is placed on the right hand side of the handset and the volume rocker is placed above it. The top has a micro USB port, 3.5 mm audio jack and even a 2mm pin charger slot.

All in all we are more than satisfied with the build quality of the Nokia Asha 501. The handset continues Nokia’s tradition of excellent hardware and is perhaps the best built budget handset you can buy right now. The soft touch matte finish plastic used feels great and does not attract any fingerprints. Moreover the backplate is easily changeable and users can buy additional colors to customize their device. Worth keeping in mind that the button seen on the back of the phone is attached to the speaker and cannot be removed. The design legacy pioneered with the N9 can definitely be seen in the hardware and more so in the software.

Display
The Nokia Asha 501 has been equipped with a 3 inch QVGA display. The TFT screen with a resolution of 240×320 has a pixel density of 133ppi. The capacitive multitouch screen is fairly vibrant.

Responsiveness is also pretty good but we felt black levels were a bit lacking. Brightness too could have been a tad bit higher. Given the price point of the handset it is hard to find faults in the screen. Outdoor visibility is quite decent as well but could benefit from slightly higher brightness levels.

Software
Nokia’s new Asha Touch UI is a splitting image of the Nokia N9′s MeeGo Harmattan operating system. The entire operating system can be navigated using gestures and a single hardware back button can be seen below which is used to go up a submenu. The interface is easy to learn and remains responsive which is something that first time users will appreciate.

Another trick that the Asha 501 has picked up from the Nokia N9 is double tap to unlock. The lock screen itself doesn’t support any application shortcuts but displays notifications for missed calls, messages and calendar events. Tapping these takes you to relevant applications. The entire interface can be divided into two segments. As soon as you unlock the phone, you are presented with the app launch or Fastlane pane.

Fastlane is the evolution of the N9′s single pane notification panel. It keeps a track of all activity including opened apps, calendar events, social network posts and more. The Facebook and Gallery apps also show up here under recent activity. If you’re using the music player, a single line with the name of the track and a one touch play/pause button will show up next to it.

The app launcher on the Nokia Asha 501 is a 4×4 grid and does not support folders. Tap and hold enters the edit mode where you can delete apps. Notifications for missed calls leave a small drop down on top which serves as a reminder and you can pull it up to see who the caller was. The swipe based gestures continue further throughout the OS wherein you can close applications by swiping it away from the end of the screen. Similarly swiping up from the bottom pulls out a context menu in certain applications.

Customization on the phone is limited to a wallpaper and sounds. The phone can be configured to permanently display a clock on the lock screen. Considering this is not an AMOLED display, there will be a bit of a power drain on using this feature but it should be fairly minimal.

The phone also supports Nokia’s Xpress browser which offers server side compression to increase speed and reduce data consumption. It is possible to control the level of compression. In terms of features, you get tabbed browsing and a startup page that integrates fresh content like sports, entertainment. The experience isn’t comparable to a full fledged browser but it works well enough to quickly check information online. Rendering performance is pretty good and it is possible to switch between 6 web windows.

The dialer and contacts app contain standard features but we were a bit surprised to see the lack of a smart dialer. The contacts app is minimalistic and shows only essential information at first glance with further data hidden under a swipe. The Nokia Asha 501 supports dual active SIM cards and as such you can receive and make calls from either number. The handset can also remember profile data for up to 5 SIM cards.

We were pleasantly surprised by the keyboard on the Nokia Asha 501.  We were able to adjust to the smaller screen within minutes and were typing out error free messages at a steady clip. Changing languages too is very easy and can be done via a long press and swipe on the space bar. The keyboard here is a far cry from the horrible implementations previously seen on several Nokia devices and we are definitely glad to see this.

The music player lacks key features like equalizers and has only the bare essentials. The interface showcases the artwork with basic track related information. The gallery app supports pinch to zoom and can share images via email or bluetooth. Basic editing options are also available. Users also get access to a file manager. There’s also the whole point about applications. Yes, the Asha 501 has an App Store onboard. The apps being churned out are rudimentary at best but do add functionality to the phone. Nokia has partnered with a range of cellphone video game developers to offer a variety of games for free. Considering buyers in this segment are looking for more multimedia offerings, this is a smart move.

Camera
The Nokia Asha 501 is equipped with a 3.15 MP camera and lacks auto focus capabilities. The interface is basic and sports a shutter button, gallery shortcut, zoom slider and a toggle to switch between photo and video modes. Additional settings include a self timer, effects. It is also possible to select the size of the image.

Images are passable and because of the fixed focus nature, you won’t be able to shoot close up photographs with the Nokia Asha 501. The images are nice and vibrant but are fairly lacking in details. It’ll do for the occasional snapshot but little else. Night time images are very noisy and the lack of an LED flash means that you should probably refrain from shooting low light shots with the camera on the Asha 501. Video can also be captured at a very disappointing QVGA resolution. Frame rates are limited to about 15 FPS. All said and done, you probably should’t bother shooting video with the Nokia Asha 501.

Battery Life & Connectivity
Connectivity options are basically restricted to bluetooth and the built in microSD card slot. Considering the built-in storage is just 128MB, Nokia is bundling along a 4GB memory card so that you can store your multimedia content on it. The card slot and one of the two SIM slots is located on the side. The other is placed below the battery.

The phone ships in Dual SIM and Single SIM variants. Battery life varies a fair bit depending on the variant you chose. The battery is a 1200 mAh unit and is rated for 48 days of standby, 17 hours of calling. It is hard to put a number on real life battery times but with extended standby times and a fair bit of heavy usage, the phone still had about 25% charge at the time of publishing this review.

Conclusion
The Nokia Asha 501 offers a very compelling experience to a first time buyer and will also serve well as a second device for smartphone owners. The refreshed design language and MeeGo-esque operating system is a pleasure to behold.

The phones pack in all the essentials needed in a device from this category and little else but that works out well here. The 501 works brilliantly well as a communications tool with a sprinkling of multimedia functionality added in. This brings us to what is perhaps the biggest question. Should you buy the Asha 501 or go in for a super cheap Android phone ? We would recommend going in for the Nokia Asha 501 because of the excellent hardware quality, reliable communications platform it offers. The Nokia Asha goes on sale starting 1st July in India at a price point of Rs. 5,199.

Pros

• Excellent hardware
• Intuitive software
• Replaceable shells
• Battery life

Cons

• Below average camera
• No 3G

Samsung Galaxy Grand Quattro Review

Samsung announced the Galaxy Grand Win (GT-I8550) and Win Duos (GT-I8552) back in April. It waslaunched in India in as Galaxy Grand Quattro last month. We brought you the Unboxing recently, here we have the complete review of the device. The Galaxy Grand Quattro has a similar design as the other recent Galaxy phones with curved corners and chrome finish all around. It runs on the Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean. This is the first device from Samsung to be powered by the latest Snapdragon 200 8625Q processor. Let’s dive into the complete review.

Unboxing

The phone comes in a small box with all the contents tightly packed inside.

Box Contents

The box contents include

• Samsung Galaxy Grand Quattro smartphone
• 2000 mAh battery
• In-ear earphone with earbuds
• 2-pin charger
• micro USB cable
• Quick start guide
• Warranty card

Hardware

The Galaxy Grand Duos has a 4.7-inch capacitive touch screen display at a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels and 198 ppi pixel density, better than the Galaxy Grand that we reviewed recently. The phone comes only in White color.

In the picture above, you can see the RGB stripes on the display. There is a large ear piece above the display and a 0.3-megapixel (VGA) front-facing camera. Theproximity sensor is present right next to the camera. The phone has Accelerometer and Digital Compass, but it misses the ambient light sensor and the gyro sensor. There is a Samsung branding below the ear piece and a Duos branding next to the camera.

There is a large home button below the display, usually seen on Samsung smartphones. There are menu and back buttons on either sides. These are backlit and offers haptic feedback.

It is 9.65 mm thick just 0.5mm thicker than the Grand Duos. The volume rocker is present on the left side.

On the right side there is a power button.

There is a tiny microphone hole on the bottom next to the micro USB slot.

The 3.5mm audio jack is present on the top. There is a Qualcomm sticker on the top since the Qualcomm SoC in the phone has a built-in 3G modem.

The phone has chrome finish on the sides. It looks like metal, but it is actually plastic.

There is a 5-megapixel camera on the back with LED Flash. There is a speaker grill with chrome finish on the other side of the camera.

The plastic back is shiny and has tiny patterns similar to the Galaxy Grand.

The plastic back is not easy to remove and replace. You have to pull it hard till the lock is out. Once you remove the back cover, you can see the battery, micro SD and the SIM card slots.

The phone has micro SIM card slots. This is the first Dual SIM phone from Samsung to launch in India that feature micro SIM slots. Even the Samsung Galaxy Mega 5.8 that launched recently has micro SIM slots for both the SIMs. The first SIM card slot is present on the top, below the camera, under the micro SD card slot, so that you need to remove the battery to insert the SIM card. This lets you expand the memory up to 32GB.

The battery compartment is made of metal. The second micro SIM slot is present below the battery. Even though it doesn’t need you to remove the battery to replace the secondary SIM, you need to restart the device every time you replace the SIM card.

Camera

The 5-megapixel auto focus camera takes decent shots in daylight. The phone has LED flash for low-light imaging. The camera UI is exactly similar to the Grand Duos including quick shortcuts on the left pane to switch camera, flash settings, shooting mode, add effects and more. It lacks zero shutter lag so it takes few seconds to capture the image. There are different shooting modes (Single Shot, Face detection, Panorama, Share Shot, Buddy photo, Beauty and Smile Shot). There are different effects (Black and White, Sepia and Negative). There are different Scene modes. Other camera features include, enable GPS tag, option to adjust the white balance, exposure value, Metering mode and ISO. It also has option to edit shortcuts in the side pane.

Here are some camera samples (click to view the full resolution image)

The phone can record videos at 480p resolution (480×720 pixels) at 30 fps. The video quality is decent and the audio is also good even though the phone lacks a secondary microphone.

Software

The phone runs on Android 4.1.2 (Jelly Bean) with Touchwiz user interface and has nature UX with all the usual sounds. The home screen shows the weather widget, a Google search bar with voice search and shortcuts. You can add up to 7 home screens. You can press and hold on the home screen to change the wallpaper, add apps and widgets or create a folder.

The lock screen shows time and lets you swipe on the shortcuts to launch the apps quickly. Other than Swipe unlock, you can use several screen lock options including, motion, face unlock, face and voice, pattern, PIN and password. It also lock screen ticker, clock and weather app. It misses the ripple effect.

The drop down notification shade has quick shortcut toggles for WiFi, GPS, Sound, Screen rotation, Bluetooth, Sync and more, but you cannot customize the shortcuts. There is a brightness control bar below that, since the phone lacks a ambient light sensor auto brightness option is missing. Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) has rich notifications that lets you perform several actions right from the notification bar such as delete, share etc. You also get several options on the drop-down menu when you plugin the headset that lets you launch these apps quickly.

You can press and hold the home button to view the multitasking screen. It has options to quickly launch the device manager, open Google Now and clear all the background apps. You can also press and hold the menu button to open Google Now quickly. This doesn’t have Multi Window, S Voice and Page buddy that were present in the Grand Duos.

The Home screen mode also has Easy mode for beginners that offers large widgets. The Smart stay feature keeps the screen awake when you are looking at it. This doesn’t work in a room with low lighting conditions since it uses the front-facing camera to detect your eyes. The motion features include Direct call that lets you call a displayed contact or the user in the SMS, just by holding the phone to your ear, Smart alert, Shake to update and mute/pause just by turning over the phone.

In the settings there is Blocking mode that would let you disable notifications, alarm and timer for a period of time. There is power saving mode let you optimize the power by limiting the maximum CPU performance, and the screen power saving reduces the screen frame rate and lowers the brightness. This is much useful, and lets you save battery life. You can use this when you are not playing games, since it reduces the CPU performance.

You get 5.06 GB of user memory out of 8GB of internal memory and 840 MB of usable RAM. You can’t move the apps to the micro SD card or select the default storage option. Since the phone has 5GB of user memory, this would be more than enough until you are not installing large games. You can store music and videos in the memory card.

Apps

The phone comes with several pre-installed apps. The utility apps include, Calculator, Clock, Gallery, My Files (File Manager), Memo (Note taking app) and Voice Recorder. The Google apps include, Chrome, Google Search, Google+, Google Maps, Google Talk (now Hangouts), Voice Search and YouTube. It comes with ChatON, Samsung’s own cross-platform messaging app. Group Play lets you enjoy music, play games, and share pictures and documents with other Samsung Galaxy devices over WiFi.

Music Player and FM Radio

The music player has a simple UI. It can play MP3, AAC, AAC＋, eAAC＋, WMA, RA formats. There are different tabs at the top that shows songs based on different categories. The Music square scans your library and lists the songs based on different emotions. The SoundAlive equalizer settings has different equalizer presets. You can also adjust the speed of the song (0.5x to 2x) from the settings. You can stream the audio to a Bluetooth speaker or a headset since the phone supports A2DP.

The phone has FM Radio with RDS and recording. You can also pause the recording in the middle, and continue it later. The auto scan feature scans the stations automatically. The auto off feature in both the music player and FM radio lets you turn it off automatically after a particular time. The loudspeaker output is good and the bundled in-ear earphones are decent. It plays videos at WVGA (800 x 480 pixels) and it doesn’t pop-up play feature.

Calls and Messaging

There options to call or send a message using either SIMs in the dial pad and the SMS compose screen since this is a dual SIM phone. The new Samsung Keyboard has continuous input similar to the stock Android 4.2 keyboard that lets you just glide to input text. Other keyboard features include, predective text input, character preview and more. It doesn’t offer haptic feedback.

Smart Dual SIM

The phone has Smart Dual SIM feature similar to the Galaxy Grand Duos that lets you we reviewed last year. This automatically forwards calls from the phone number on SIM 2, even if a user is on the phone with SIM 1’s number. The SIM card manager in the settings lets you enable the Smart Dual SIM feature. It doesn’t work on all the service providers since some of them don’t allow call forwarding when busy. Call waiting is free but operators charge for call forwarding.

Performance and Benchmarks

The phone is powered by a 1.2 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 MSM8625Q processor with Adreno 203 GPU. Performance of the phone is good when compared to others smartphones in the similar price range. Games were smooth, since the GPU is not powerful, it lacked some details.

Here is a Modern combat 4 Gameplay demo on the Grand Quattro

Here are the benchmarks of the device

Quadrant Benchmark

The Samsung Galaxy Grand Quattro tops the Quadrant benchmark.

AnTuTu Benchmark 3.3

It scores over 11k in the AnTuTu Benchmark 3.3, better than the Karbonn Titanium S5.

Linpack – Single Thread

Linpack – Multi Thread

Even though the phone tops the Linpack single thread benchmark. It scores around 108 points similar to A116 in the Linpack multi-thread benchmark.

Vellamo 2 HTML5

In the Vellamo 2 HTML5 browser benchmark the phone scores 1386 slightly better than the Titanium S5.

Vellamo 2 Metal

It crosses 400 points in the Vellamo 2 Metal, CPU subsystem performance scores. Check out the complete set of Samsung Galaxy Grand Quattro benchmarks here.

Connectivity

The connectivity features include, 3G (HSDPA: 7.2 Mbps, HSUPA: 5.76Mbps), Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth v 3.0 with A2DP and GPS. It has DLNA support to stream content to near by DLNA supported devices. The AllShare Play which is now called Samsung Link lets you share the content with other smart devices easily. You can enable the Kies via Wi-Fi enables in the connectivity settings to connect to the Kies app on your PC if you are connected to same WiFi network. It doesn’t have WiFi Direct or NFC support.

Battery

The 2000 mAh battery lasts for a day with few hours of music, few images, calls, SMS and browsing over 3G. You can use the power saving mode that optimizes the power, screen frame rate and brightness to improve the battery life. Battery life is slightly better than the Grand Duos.

Conclusion

Even though the phone has a low display resolution compared to the other Dual SIM Android smartphones in the similar price range, it has pixel density of 198 ppi, slightly better than the Grand Duos. The performance it good without any lags. The phone runs on Android 4.1 out of the box which is a good thing, but it some software feature that were present on the Grand Duos including the Multi-window, Direct Call, Pop up Video and S Voice. Video recording at 480p resolution and the lack of ambient light sensor is disappointing. At a price tag of about Rs. 16,900 (MRP), if you want a dual SIM Android smartphone from Samsung with decent battery life, but can compromise on the video recording and some software features, go for it.

Pros

• Runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean out of the box
• Dual SIM support with Smart dual SIM feature
• micro SIM slots
• 8GB of internal memory

Cons

• Low resolution display
• 480p video recording
• No ambient light sensor

Sony Xperia Honami

Sony Xperia Honami specs, price, release date rumours

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.