Huawei Ascend is a perfect budget Android phone that offers sleek design and nine-panel grid home screen for 3.5 inch HVGA display. It is a well designed and well priced smartphone, which is designed for those who don’t require most modest specifications. Huawei, a China based Company is expanding its United States footprint with the introduction of Ascend, Android 2.1 phone now selling at MetroPCS and Cricket Wireless.
Huawei Price
The Huawei Ascend is available for the price of $100 and is a decent smartphone with attractive 3.5 inch HVGA touchscreen, support for Wi-Fi and 3G and solid build quality. It comes with sloping chin and rounded corners with shiny plastic back and face dressed up with polished chrome sides and dark gray bezel.
Hard Specification
The Huawei Ascend measures 0.55 inch deep, 4.5 inches high and 2.4 inches wide, which makes it on par with other smartphones in terms of pocketability. It weighs 4.7 ounces and has a solid feel in the hand. It features a 3.5 inch high resolution capacitive touchscreen that boasts 262,000 colors and 480 x 320 pixel resolution.
The virtual keyboard comes with large buttons, which are pretty easy to press. Underneath the display, you will four different buttons including heavy stylized End and Talk, Menu and Back keys. The volume rocker button, camera button, microSD card slot and power button are located on the right and left side of the device. The hatch reveals the 2.5mm headphone jack and micro USB charging port. You will find the 3.2 megapixel camera on the plastic coated back cover.
Operating System – Huawei Ascend
The operating system of Huawei Ascend features an onscreen navigation strip, which contains finger friendly icons including, the application tray, view of home screens, phone book, text composition window and contact list. One of the unique features found on this model is the nine-grid home screen, which allows you to swipe through three different home screens from south to north and three for west to east, filling up each with bookmarks, widgets and shortcuts.
Easy to use
The Ascend is very easy to use; however the dialer interface forces you to open the menu for turning on the speakerphone. It is preloaded with plenty of software and hardware features such as full range of wireless options including GPS, Bluetooth, 3G and Wi-Fi, voice dialing, threaded multimedia and text messaging and speakerphone. The Ascend’s phonebook is limited by the memory and there is room for multiple numbers, photo caller IDs, email addresses, group IDs and IM handles.
The Huawei Ascend also allows you to combine contact information from different accounts including Outlook and Gmail. You will find plenty of applications in this model such as HTML browser, file manager with phone’s multimedia files, Google Maps, Latitude social location application, Gmail, audio recorder, Navigation, YouTube and Places.
Some of the spoonful of its own shortcuts and applications are MetroWeb browser, shortcut to extras, Metro4111, Metro email, MetroNavigator, @Apps Metro Application Store and MetroPCS Easy Wi-Fi. Some of the third party applications are Boingo Wi-Fi, Virtual Card, Document to go, Uno, free games shortcut, Pocket Express, Loopt, Mobile IM and Mobile Banking.
The Huawei Ascend also supports Exchange, Gmail, IMAP and POP3 accounts. The Android makes it easy for sharing video and shots through email, multimedia messaging, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social networking websites. It comes with built-in 512MB memory and there is a 16GB memory card slot.
The estimated battery life of Ascend is 12.4 days in standby mode and 3.5 hours in talktime mode. Overall it is not a high end smartphone, but will surely appeal to some with its hardware specifications.