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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tim851 - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
"The first place to start is industrial and material design. While many people like to suggest that any weight given to ID or MD is effectively evaluating fashion for the sake of evaluating fashion, design is critical to a phone's utility. A phone or a tablet is something that people will be constantly feeling and looking at, thus a phone that's unergonomic or finished poorly will dramatically affect the rest of the experience."I agree. The problem is that most reviews don't really criticize material or industrial design, but aesthetic design and whether or not a device is made from plastics or metal. As if metal has any advantage over metal besides it's perceived quality.
The abundant disses of Samsung's devices on the use of glossy plastics (or lately the faux materials) are totally unnecessary. Any customer can judge a phone's looks by themselves, they don't need a reviewer to help them out.
Euphonious - Saturday, June 14, 2014 - link
This review honestly tells me practically nothing about how pleasant or enjoyable the device actually is to use. You've discussed the luminance and white balance of the display in exhaustive detail whilst glossing over the software and the actual experience of using the device in three fairly short paragraphs.How much difference does it make to the real-world desirability of a phone if its saturation accuracy is 3.6063 rather than 3.8685? Nobody is going to notice that, but they will notice a shoddy UI or an unergonomic design. Reducing everything to numbers really misses the pleasure and pain points which make a good or a bad phone.
nrfitchett4 - Friday, March 20, 2015 - link
I bought this about 3 months ago and don't regret it at all. Sold my LG G2 to amazon for 145 and got this for 290. It is a little unwieldy at times due to size, but its easy to use, runs really well and I haven't had any software problems. I don't use many apps these days, and only play a couple of games so 16gb of storage with a 32gb micro sd card works fine for me. I unlocked mine using code from Huawei (all you have to do is ask) and rooted it. Its running JB, but I'm scared of what lollipop would do to an already great software experience. I wasn't a fan of the UI at first, but decided against 3rd party launchers when I saw how much battery they were eating.torimish - Sunday, June 15, 2014 - link
I really think Huawei deserves some more brand recognition. I'm in Australia, and I recently purchased the Huawei Mediapad Honor X1 - basically a 7" phablet, a great convergence device. I've done away with my ultrabook, and use this while travelling with a BT keyboard, and while it's pretty big for pocket use, it's easy to stash in my hand-bag.The quality of these phones - and the price point they are currently sitting at - make for excellent value. I took a gamble (was advised build quality wasn't up to some of the other devices), but I have been very pleasantly surprised. This Ascend looks good, too.
I'd seriously recommend anyone try these Huawei devices. Build quality and finish is up there with the likes of Samsung and Sony and Apple. I'd really like to see Anand do a review of the Mediapad X1. You can't argue with fully unlocked, broad gamut of 4G/LTE bands, 1920x1200 resolution etc for less than $400 USD . . . and all day or two battery life.
MarkWebb - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
Ordered!mikkej2k - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
OK phone.Gethuawei.com website is broken. Call in customer service is also awful - be careful.
zlinghaha - Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - link
Avoid this crap. I just got the phone but found it cannot connect to a mobile network when I turn off Wi-Fi after it stays on Wi-Fi for some time. It cannot connect to a mobile network even after I re-start the device. This is over-hyped crap.FarWestNow - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
A good phone with a great camera (13mp). It's big, but I got used to it pretty quickly. I drop phones constantly, so I bought a Trident case, which so far seems to be fine. (looked for an Otter Box but they don't make one for the AM2.) Only real downside is that it gobbles up data like a fiend and my model came stuffed w/Google apps, and I've had to shut off the mobile network data manually when I'm off Wi-Fi to make sure I stay under my data cap. Four out of five stars....nrfitchett4 - Friday, March 20, 2015 - link
turn off auto-sync. I haven't noticed any extra data used. You can turn off mobile data as well, leaving only wifi, phone and sms on.