Huawei Ascend Mate 2 Review: Incredible Battery Life & Value
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Joshua Ho on June 12, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Mobile
- Ascend Mate 2
Display
As always, with all touch-only devices the display is one of the most critical aspects of the experience. A poor display can often make the experience worse, even frustrating. Things like poor viewing angles, poor color calibration, low peak brightness, high minimum brightness, and other flaws in the display are all potential areas where a display can fall short. In order to try and add a level of quantitative analysis, we turn to SpectraCal’s CalMAN 5 with a custom workflow to test our displays.
As always, before we get to colors, it’s important to cover the basics. In brightness and contrast, the Mate2 is great, there’s really nothing else to be said. While I’d like to see LCDs start hitting higher brightness levels (without RGBW subpixel layout), this is a great start compared to its competition. I also didn’t notice any issues with viewing angles, and while the pixel density is below 300 PPI, it's surprisingly acceptable.
Next up is grayscale. It's important to note here that these grayscale measurements were done with the i1 Pro, so the luminance values at the low end are usually inaccurate, thus the contrast won't agree with the i1Display Pro. Here things are still in line with most flagships today, but it’s still a bit disappointing to see that most OEMs favor higher maximum luminance over proper white balance. Like the Galaxy S5, some levels of gray have a noticeable green tint to them. Nokia and Sony are probably the ones to follow here by offering adjustable white point based on user preference. For a 300 dollar phone, this is a great showing.
In the saturation sweep, Huawei effectively puts many other OEMs to shame. While there’s a hint of saturation compression, this is a great calibration out of the box. The only notable issues are that the magenta saturations are a bit too blue, and that the yellows are shifted towards the green. This level of calibration is withing reach of Apple’s iPhones, the Nexus 5, and the One (M7).
Finally, the same trend is seen in the GMB ColorChecker. Huawei excels here, and is easily competitive with high-end phones. Overall, this is an extremely good display. It’s good enough to put some recent high-end smartphones to shame.
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Fergy - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
You don't buy purely on pricepoint. You find out what kind of phone you want and then look for the best price/performance ratio. If I want a phablet I will look at a few phablets like this one and note3. The question becomes: is note3 worth the extra premium?Impulses - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
That's a generalization, and I can make the opposite case too: most people don't buy unlocked phones by paying full price upfront, and once you do you often have a price point already in mind (often something under $400).PubFiction - Saturday, June 21, 2014 - link
It still wouldn't hurt to throw other phablets in for comparison or controlled outgroups. And to be more fair they could do something like compare it to a note 2 or an older phone since many companies do not really have mid range phones they just have late model phones that are not midrange due to age.dawheat - Thursday, June 12, 2014 - link
This honestly seems like one of the worst reviews on Anandtech.- 1 line about the 720p resolution on such a large screen - 240dpi is so 2012 and easily seen on any web page
- Pretty bad GPU performance
- For phablets, put to shame by the Oppo or OnePlus phones which are not much more expensive but far more capable.
Maybe a year ago this phone would be a worthwhile budget phablet, but Oppo and OnePlus have already shaken up the phablet market.
nevertell - Thursday, June 12, 2014 - link
But it's a gr8 m8, m8, I r8 8/8.coolhardware - Thursday, June 12, 2014 - link
For someone that wants LENGTHY battery life without adding an extended battery (for Note2, Note3 etc.), this seems like a nice choice. The pixel density is low http://pixensity.com/list/phone/ (it is very near the bottom) but for a quite capable unlocked phone the price is not bad IMHO.SanX - Saturday, June 14, 2014 - link
Totally agree. I couldn't believe to see Anand name on the top of this absurd review of such utter junk. Hey Anand, everything is fine there? Need an eye doctor or others too? Holly &&%$$, it's like i swimmed in the toulet at Engadget.nrfitchett4 - Friday, March 20, 2015 - link
have you even tried the phone? It runs surprising well. The only time it bogs down is after several hours straight of clash of clans with xmod running on top. The only crash I've seen is an occasional contacts crash (weird because I can't find any info on why, maybe other contacts being imported). It runs much better than my G2 at half the price. I bought it because I am no longer subsidizing or financing phones and I was tired of having to charge my "great battery life" G2 at work. I love the battery optimizations and how it tells you if apps are eating battery in the background instead of a bunch of nonsensical google services in the battery list. I noticed the 720p screen for the first day, and after that, I didn't notice it being grainy or pixelated.To each their own, but I find that the midrange market is prime for explosive growth because Android runs just fine on lower end hardware. Funny how lower end hardware is snapdragon 400 and 2gb of RAM...
cknobman - Thursday, June 12, 2014 - link
Why dont you ever throw in the Nokia Lumia 1520 into these comparisons? Especially when you are looking at things 5.5+ inches?I'd love to see how my Lumia stacks up against some of these other phones.
I have never done an official battery life test but everyday @7am I take it off the charger and @11pm I put it back on and it always has >50% battery life left.
If I dont do any gaming or heavy downloading it will have >60%.
Duraz0rz - Thursday, June 12, 2014 - link
No reason to not include the 1520/930/Icon camera in the comparison, at the very least, especially when he mentions the Lumias on the camera architecture page!