Maaaate, have I just held the biggest phone in my life, Huawei’s latest, their Ascend Mate. It’s an enormousness 6.1-inch Android device that will be hitting Aussie shores next week for the very cool price $429 unlocked through Harvey Norman.
Your new best mate will feature features a 6.1-inch 720P IPS+ display with hyper sensitivity (like the Lumia 920), 1GB of RAM, 8GB storage and an 8-megapixel camera, all powered by Huawei’s in-house 1.5Ghz quad-core chipset and a huge 4050mAh battery.
The device was nice in the hand and I quite enjoyed the design, it felt quite sturdy especially compared to most devices in its price range.
Huawei has designed its own skin top put on top of the Jellybean 4.1 device, named the Emotion UI. The Emotion UI’s main thing it tries to do is chuck everything it thinks you need right in front of you, mainly done with its Me widget.
The Me widget is a customisable panel on your home screen that you can chuck things on like your favourite contacts, local weather, a clock and pictures. The Emotion UI also ditches the traditional app drawer of Android and puts all your apps on your home screens, sort of like what iOS would be like if it had widgets.
One cool feature of the Emotion UI that I thought was its one-hand UI optimisation tool which essentially moved the keyboard over to one side of the device which allowed you to use the device with one hand if you needed to.
From the few shots I had with the camera, it seemed to do a decent job, but not quite up to par with the current batch of high-end handsets – for $429 you don’t expect it to be, though.
The device is quoted to have around 2 days of moderate use battery life or 9 days of standby time. It’s 4050mAh battery is massive beating out the Galaxy Note II by nearly 1000mAh.
The device lacks LTE, but packs 4 HSPA bands which Huawei said they did because they wanted to do 3G right rather than do a 4G that’s not quite something you can use world-wide.
Depending on who you ask at Huawei, it’s either a really big smartphone or a phablet, either way I’m really interested in getting my hands on a review unit.
You can get the device next Monday for $429 through Harvey Norman, which also includes a Boost starter pack, running on Telstra’s network. The phone is only going to be sold outright, so don’t go looking for it at your nearest carrier either.
(Note: some these photos are taken from Gizmodo who were also at the event as I was stupid and forgot my camera.)
