Gadgetory

what is going on guys lon here from Android authority and Huawei is making quite the splash with its latest offering it's a really big phone with some pretty nice specs actually and a very affordable price tag let's go ahead and take a look at the huawei ascend mate - wow way doesn't have a huge presence in the US when it comes to smartphones but they're looking to change that with the ascend mate - and starting with the design the ascend mate - is essentially just a rectangular slab with some slightly rounded corners and a tapered back it's a pretty simple design nothing too unique about it but it is a pretty good-looking phone for as simple as it is the dark grey band along the sides may look like metal but the phone is entirely made of plastic and the removable back has a nice texture to it so the phone is very grippy and easy to hold onto and speaking of the removable back taking the back off will give you access to your sim and microSD card slots but the battery however is completely sealed in so you're not gonna be able to swap batteries here even though it's made of plastic it feels extremely solid in the hand it doesn't bend or creak so I had no problems at all with this phone when it comes to the build quality taking a tour around the ascend mate - you'll find the 3.5 milimeter headset jack up top micro USB port on the bottom nothing on the left and you're very conveniently placed power and volume keys on the right and I say conveniently because the ascend mate 2 is a really big phone so having the power and volume keys on the side make a world of a difference when it comes to the handling of this phone I'm not saying the ascend mate - is a one-handed device by any stretch of the imagination but the side Mountain Keys does make one-handed experience a little bit more manageable the single speaker is located on the back towards the bottom and obviously if you've got your phone facing upwards you're going to get muffled audio but for what it is the sound quality is acceptable but it certainly isn't going to win any awards now the biggest reason why this phone is so large is because of that 6.1 inch display on the front and that's pretty much all there is on the front there's no capacitive or physical keys because Huawei opted for on-screen keys it is 720p but honestly I still think 720p is a very respectable resolution when it comes to displays on smartphones since the resolution is being stretched across a 6.1 inch screen I do notice pixels in some of the finer details like the folders but it's nothing that really bothered me too much and for the most part it's a really good-looking display it's very bright viewing angles are good and it's got really nice and punchy colors and because this display is so big it's really enjoyable for watching videos and playing games even if it is only 720p I still find this to be a really nice looking display overall when it comes to performance the ascend mate 2 is being powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 clocked at 1.6 gigahertz the audrina 305 GPU and 2 gigs of ram which I was really surprised about because most mid-range phones in this price range usually shipped with only one to one and a half gigs of RAM the rest of the specs are pretty much on par with other mid-range phones but in regular everyday usage I didn't have any issues with performance whether it was swiping through home screens opening and closing apps or multitasking everything ran just fine without any hiccups at all gaming was also solid I was able to play pretty much anything without any sort of noticeable lag or dropped frames so overall I was pleasantly surprised and its phones like the ascend mate to that go to show that you don't always have to have the latest and greatest specs to have a phone that performs well on the back of the ascend mate 2 is a 13 megapixel camera so it sounds like it's going to be a relatively decent shooter at least on paper but let's talk about the camera UI first and it's actually very minimal you won't find too much going on here but you've got your usual settings like ISO white balance exposure etc and a few shooting modes that you can play around with but nothing out of the ordinary with 13 megapixels pictures are very sharp and detailed but overall picture quality is just average at best color reproduction is decent but I noticed that this camera always has the tendency to overexpose with pretty much every single photo that I took leading to a lot of very unbalanced shots it does have an aperture of f28 ovo so low-light photography certainly is possible and it's probably one of the better cameras that I've used when it comes to low-light now I usually don't talk about front-facing cameras because most of the time they are really basic but the front-facing camera on the ascend mate 2 is a 5 megapixel wide-angle lens so it's great for taking some high-quality selfies and Huawei is capitalizing on the selfie craze with their own feature called group V if you can't figure out what it is by the name essentially a group V is a selfie but with a group of people it's not anything groundbreaking by any means it's basically just a panorama shot with the front camera but I did find it to be a feature that made the front camera a lot of fun to use the ascend mate 2 is a big phone and with a big phone comes a very large 3900 milliamp hour battery this is basically a small tablet battery inside of a smartphone and this phone pretty much lasts forever I was able to easily get at least 2 days out of it before having to recharge and I got over 8 hours of screen on time which is just ridiculous for a phone and I can easily say that this is the best battery life that I've ever experienced on any smartphone and finally onto the software and the ascend mate 2 is running Android 4.3 jelly bean which is kind of unfortunate hopefully this is a device that Huawei will feel compelled to keep updated but we're just gonna have to wait and see on that on top of Android 4.3 is flyways emotion UI and it's quite the departure from your typical Android experience there is no app drawer so everything lives on your home screen so you'll have to use folders if you want to keep things clean by default the emotion UI is very bright and colorful but if that's not your style you can change that through the built-in theme app to something more scaled-back there's also an easy mode with very big colorful and easy to read shortcuts if you want a more simplified experience another notable feature is the Wow button or window on window give you access to standard Android soft keys and the ability to run a limited amount of apps on a screen at the same time overall while the emotion UI does stray from stock Android quite a bit and most likely won't be for everyone the features that it brings to the table are actually useful without being gimmicky now besides the great battery life and the large display the best part about this phone is the price it's available now for $300 directly from Huawei and that's without a contract and it supports 4G LTE on carriers like AT&T and t-mobile in the United States and that is not by accident Huawei is actually targeting this phone towards the u.s. market so they built it with US carriers in mind so there you have it for the huawei ascend mate 2 for $300 I think it's a fantastic phone obviously there are other great phones out there in this particular price range but you're not gonna find another phone like this with a display this large and a gigantic battery that lasts forever for only $300 it's a big phone with a small price and if that's exactly what you're looking for the ascend mate 2 is definitely worth a look but that is it for this review thank you so much for watching and if you enjoyed it give it a thumbs up down below and also subscribe to the channel which is also down below and once you're done doing all that make sure to check out the website at Android Authority comm because 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