Gadgetory

hey everyone my branch of the PocketNow office is in America specifically in Boston so it's not that often that I get to review a device that hasn't received an official US carrier launch well today that's changing I'm Michael Fisher this is PocketNow comm and this is the huawei ascend p1 let's review it it's kind of tough to know where to start with the p1 it was announced back in January officially released in May and flanked and somewhat overshadowed by the announcement of other Huawei devices like the quad and the p1 s so the p1 just kind of slots in right in the middle there it's part of always attempt to break out of its budget phone reputation but it's not the best of the pack so it's kind of a weird phone to try and classify let's take a hardware tour here the p1 stands out from the pack through sort of sheer force of restraint it's a very understated device it packs a 4.3 inch display which seems impossibly small nowadays maybe a testament to how ridiculous the Jumbo phone phenomenon has become down below even though it's a phone designed for Android ICS we've got the persistent capacitive buttons for home menu and back up above the huawei branding barely visible there if we can get some light on it the earpiece grille and the lens for the 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera there's also a notification LED hidden behind the speaker grille which I always like to see I should mention that while this device is black there are other color options available such as white and pink so while we're here let's go ahead and briefly cover what's under the hood the p1 is powered by an OMAP 4460 chipset a dual-core cortex a9 CPU running at 1.5 gigahertz that's backed up by a gig of ram four gigs of on-board storage and microSD expansion up to 32 gigs around back there aren't too many surprises an 8 megapixel primary with a dual LED flash capable of shooting in 1080p and video mode over to the side barely visible here is a noise cancelling microphone then there's the very pretty I think Huawei logo here and down below on this sort of Nexus s like humph at the bottom is the speaker grille off to the side here the whole back is finished in this kind of carbon-fiber like pattern which helps liven it up a bit but the feel is straight plastic and the smooth slippery material really picks up skin oil readily you'll be wiping this one on your shirt a whole lot the real story here is on the sides every time I let somebody hold this phone they were marking how slim it is and that's for good reason the device isn't as slim as the forthcoming p1 s and it doesn't quite get down to the Motorola Droid Razr 's 7.1 millimeters but at 7.7 millimeters it's definitely one of the thinnest smartphones out there because it's such a slim device though it feels better in the hand then the wide Droid Razr does I'm talking about slimness on the face of the phone it feels really great in the hand on the side here we have the micro SD card slot standby key up on the right hand side within the easy reach of a thumb if you're right-handed over on the left we just have the volume rocker down below just the microphone and up top the SIM card slot that's a full size SIM not Micro SIM the three-and-a-half millimeter headphone jack and the micro USB port up top as for how it feels I'd call the experience of handling the p1 average Huawei has sealed the 1760 milliamp hour battery inside the device which will be a downer for some of you but that plus the Corning Gorilla Glass up front results in a casing that's very rigid there's no creaking or flexing here the phone feels solid let's talk software for a minute now Huawei is running something very close to a stock Android ICS build with the p1 with the version I tested running 4.3 there is some customization going on here though with whywe making some tweaks that are both good and bad first we have the lockscreen which resembled the lockscreen on some of the newer builds of Motorola's blur skin from here we can unlock to the right or we can jump directly into the camera messaging or phone applications and once we're in the next customization that is immediately apparent are these set of toggles in the notification tray you can turn these off if you want to but just like they are in samsung's touchwiz implementation they're very very handy to have we also have the option to enable a custom-built Huawei launcher called 3d home which kind of cartoon áfive the whole experience you get these kind of bigger icons these custom widgets a cube like 3d sort of switching experience and the occasional cutesy animation like the one that happens in the calendar icon here with the waves washing up on the beach overall I found responsiveness on the p1 to be superb especially if I left it in the 2d configuration the UI delivers a tight quick experience with a minimum of bugs and crashes where it was a problem though was the keyboard I keep jinxing myself I said the keyboard on the HTC One X was bad I said the one on the galaxy s3 was bad the one on the p1 makes either of those seem like a vacation it's almost unusable the keyboard looks inviting it's got these big tall keys that you can adjust and it's got a couple different themes to choose from if you don't like the stock colors there's even a cool feature where you swap to the side to get the numeric keypad and swap to the other side to come on back but the minute you actually start typing on it the disaster is evident the user dictionary is not well calibrated and for English at least out of the box and the autocorrect is shamefully bad it isn't as a matter of fact it's not even really working at all and that's happening in all keyboard modes now these problems even happen when I use the stock ICS keyboard or a custom one which says to me this is a problem that runs deeper than just the skin maybe a later soft we're version can fix this but if you're a messaging or email hound particularly with the English keyboard I can't recommend this device just based on the keyboard performance let's talk about the camera for a second the 8 megapixel shooter on the back of the p1 performed pretty well in my experience given enough light images were sharp and crisp and had good color saturation and all that kind of stuff lower the light a little bit though and you get a lot of noise that starts to creep in with the cameras focus also suffering as well there's also a bit of shutter lag that will cause some blur if you're not keeping your hands terribly steady more so than on other devices I've tested recently there the usual array of fun features like burst shot and panorama mode and they work fairly well overall the camera experience is decidedly average I tested the ascend p1 on AT&T and primarily in and around the Greater Boston area and in keeping with the theme of the day the p1 performance was well right about average voice calls were clear and crisp in my testing with the usual smartphone caveats speakerphone performance was a little on the tinny side and earpiece volume could have been a bit louder callers said they could hear background noise from a busy city street indicating that either Boston has noisier than I realize or that noise cancelling mic on the back isn't doing as great a job as it could reception was fine over HSPA and even edge when I ran into a few coverage holes up in Salem battery life was acceptable in my tests the device should get an average users through a full day though power users will want to keep a charger handy I didn't run into any problems either in the stock browser or in Google Chrome both of which loaded sites just fine and did their jobs as well as they should even high-octane apps like Netflix performed well and managed to avoid sucking the battery dry while doing so gaming performance was just fine on this device though with its non gargantuan display size and lower spec sheet the p1 wouldn't be any gamers first choice popular titles like Angry Bird space will run fine though the proximity of the soft keys to the display here might give you some trouble if you get too excited about things now as far as more graphically intense games my go-to tester explained is might not be the most graphically intense game of the bunch but it's still pretty beefy and the p1 runs it just fine you can see the full array of benchmarks in my full review at pocketnow.com so for my first two away phone the ascend p1 has done ok it's a pretty average phone it's got a lot going for it then it's also got a few strikes against him I like that the phone feels slim and slender in the hand without feeling too cheap or chintzy and I like that it fits easily in the pocket I like the carbon fiber like pattern on the back that along with the phone's slimness helps it stand out I like its display which isn't the best but certainly isn't the worst I like it's snappy UI performance it's reliable software and the useful tweaks that Huawei has built into Android ICS in fact I like its software performance overall and most of the time I like its camera I don't like the use of the old-style capacitive keys or the cumbersome way Huawei requires you to pull up the multitasking display I don't like the hard corners of the device which aren't comfortable in the palm or against the ear if you're talking on the phone I hate the keyboard no matter which one I'm using and I don't like that the camera needs ideal conditions to deliver good results much of the time finally while I don't really dislike its hardware design overall I don't really like it either while it's slim it's very middle of the road and really that's what defines much of the ascend p1 experience besides the keyboard it doesn't really do anything terribly but it doesn't do a lot in an exemplary fashion either it's a very average very mid-range very unremarkable device so if that's what you're in the market for and you value a very slim Android phone experience then the ascend p1 should do just fine I give it a three out of five this has been Michael with pocketnow.com thanks for watching our review of the huawei ascend p1 if you like what you saw give us a thumbs up if you would here on YouTube if you have something to say please leave a comment at the post on pocketnow.com that's where our full review lives and you can read our entire review there if you want to get more detailed about things you can follow us on twitter at pocket now twits you can follow me on twitter at captain two phones that's captain the number two phones and stay tuned for the next video it's coming soon till then thanks for watching we'll see you next time