Gadgetory

outside of the United States there are many budget smartphones available from a wide variety of manufacturers although the world wide budget smartphone market is pretty competitive many of the phones intended for worldwide markets do not fully support US carriers manufacturers have found it difficult to enter the US market with budget smartphones due to the low cost of subsidized on contract phones this has left a void in terms of what you can officially buy for under $200 in the u.s. Huawei is trying to fill this void with the huawei snap to a 180 dollar smartphone with support for both AT&T and t-mobile 4G LTE so is the snap - worth your budget smartphone buying buck this is Bailey Stein with Android authority and this is my full review of the huawei snap - when it comes to design the snap - takes a fairly simplistic approach the device is made completely a matte plastic and the rear cover has a leather-like texturize finish the finish does make the phone feel pretty nice in the hand for a budget device the edges taper ever so slightly and the leather finish makes this transition to smooth plastic the glossy plastic wrapping around the edges of the display looks nice and goes well with the smooth edges both the power and volume buttons are on the right side of the phone and have a similar glossy finish both buttons are responsive but don't feel incredibly satisfying the five megapixel rear camera is positioned towards the top right on the back of the phone right above the flash the Huawei logo appears at the center and the speaker is on the bottom left the microUSB port is on the bottom right of the phone next to the device's primary microphone bad phone jack is at the top center slightly to the right and the secondary microphone is on the left on the front of the phone you can see a bit of Huawei branding on the bottom chin and a two megapixel front-facing camera at the top right there is a notification LED at the top left corner which I really appreciate it there does seem to be a considerable amount of bezel especially considering that the phone uses on-screen buttons and 9.14 millimeters it is on the slightly thicker side that's also an average 150 grams taking off the rear cover you'll find a single Micro SIM slot and micro SD card slot you can expand the device's eight gigabytes of internal storage by using a mic rest the card up to 64 gigabytes unfortunately you can't access the 2200 milliamp battery there's nothing all that special about the design and it's clear that Huawei has instead focused on the device's internals rather than its design that's not necessarily a bad thing but if you're looking for something more aesthetically pleasing you'll likely be disappointed the snap 2 is 5 inch 720p display looks ok but there is a lack of contrast and the viewing angles are not very good once you hit about 45 degrees the brightness and quality drops significantly sunlight readability also is not very good as I had trouble reading text fall outdoors it's also kind of a fingerprint magnet despite my best efforts to keep the display free of smudges it's still managed to collect fingerprints with a quad-core Snapdragon 400 processor clocked at 1.2 gigahertz in just one gig of ram the phone does feel a bit sluggish when it comes to everyday performance the benchmark scores accurately reflect the actual performance of the device as the phone scored eight seventeen thousand nine hundred and fifty-one and then two two and three forty three single core 1150 multi-core and Geekbench the phone is certainly usable but it's slow to the point where the slowness is not only noticeable but also sometimes annoying for example the preloaded Google keyboard really kept up with what I was typing when doing simple tasks like composing text messages this is an incredibly frustrating issue that is annoying and inconvenient there were also times when I would open an app and then go back to the launcher to find that the system removed it from memory this caused about a two to three second delay for all of my app icons to reappear the one gigabyte of ram really does hinder the performance when opening more than a couple of apps the Adreno 305 GPU performs well while playing games over a graphic intensive games like asphalt 8 had lower frame rates and the occasional stutter what says the Huawei snaps you apart from similarly priced devices is it support for gsm 4G LTE networks in the United States the snap to supports quad-band GSM 850 1900 2100 AWS for HSPA+ and LTE bands 2 4 5 17 and 12 this means that the phone supports up to 4G LTE on all GSM carrier in the United States including AT&T t-mobile and they're respectable MVNOs the snap-to also has the usual GPS 802 11 and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 support the rear speaker on the snap - sounds pretty good actually I wasn't expecting much out of a budget device but I was pleasantly surprised to find good sounding audio the speaker is fairly loud and it isn't as distorted as some other budget devices one drawback of the position is that it's easily blocked when set on a flat surface the five megapixel rear camera on the Huawei snap 2 did not perform well one of the key features of the snap 2 is the ability to press the volume down key twice to take a picture this is a really handy feature but the camera itself is a very good the pictures they took were consistently out of focus and lacked sharpness the camera app is easy to use with a few different shooting modes to choose from you can manually adjust white balance and iso battery life on the snap to was surprisingly great although the battery is just 2200 milliamps battery life is incredible my day starts at 7 a.m. and ends at 1 a.m. the next day I had no trouble getting the phone to last through a full day of use and then some it's not that I wasn't using the phone during that time either as I was able to get in just under five and a half hours of screen on time battery life is definitely a strong point of a snap - and I did appreciate the power saving modes in the system settings you can set it to normal smart or endurance they said how long you want the phone to last the huawei snap 2 runs Android 4.4.4 kitkat with Huawei's emotion UI 2.3 it's not too far of a departure from stock Android but while I did make a few notable changes the pre-installed launcher does not have an app drawer which may annoy some users you can always download a third-party launcher like the Google now launcher if you wish the notification shade also looks kind of ugly in my opinion although I do think that putting the quick toggles at the top instead of on a separate panel was a good choice the app icons don't look very good either and the icons used for setting items continue this trend while they did ship the phone with the actual Google keyboard though not just the AOSP keyboard but they actually Google keyboard this is nice because you can now change the theme to material light or material dark in the settings which is what I prefer the recent app switcher is pretty similar to the stock app switcher although Huawei has added individual closed buttons and a one touch clean button the lockscreen may not be visually desirable but it does let users swipe for phone messaging or camera you can also quickly swipe up to open tools including calendar calculator flashlight and clock that's nice and all but I still prefer being able to see my notifications quickly and easily so I installed a see display which sort of emulates the Motorola active launcher I did really enjoy the ability to change each volume profile by pressing the setting button after adjusting the volume I really wish that every Android phone had this feature as it's extremely annoying to have to go into the system settings on other devices there are a few pre-installed apps that come with the huawei snap 2 but it's not bad and you do have to keep in mind that you'll be free of any carrier bloatware while Y does give users the options to use a simple home screen mode if you prefer to have a cleaner looking launcher I did really enjoy the ability to disable apps from running when the screen is off I think this helps with battery life quite a bit finally there is a notification manager so you can change which apps can send you notifications this is again a really great feature that I'm glad Huawei brought to Android 4.4 the ability to turn out that annoying game that keeps sending you reminders to play is great on the downside I wasn't very happy with the default notification sound or should I say music whenever I received a notification from apps like snapchat or Gmail the phone would play a song I think that's kind of excessive and I'm very confused as to why this would be the default setting I see how some users may appreciate the option to have the phone play a one-minute song for their occasional text messages but for someone who receives notifications quite frequently it's got annoying really quickly luckily you can change this in the settings you can pick up the huawei snap shoe in black or white with a gigabytes of internal storage for one hundred and eighty dollars out of Amazon or get huawei comm that's a pretty good price but I'm afraid that there may be better options available for many users while the snap 2 does have some strong selling points like LTE support a good sounding speaker and incredible battery life I don't think that this is a good choice for the average user buying a budget smartphone officially with LTE support in the u.s. is great but you really have to ask yourself whether you're willing to give up a lot of what makes a smart phone good the snap choose display performance and camera are all pretty disappointing and that makes the phone a tough sell but simply there are similarly priced options like the Moto G 2nd generation and Asus zenfone 2 there are just much better phones overall that's not to say that there isn't a market for the huawei snap 2 but I want to recommend it over the above-mentioned devices thank you for watching this video and please make sure to give it a thumbs up below if you found it helpful or informative also please make sure to subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more content and feel free to leave a comment below finally be sure to visit the Android Authority website for additional coverage as we are your source for all things Android