DISPLAY
The 4.5in display is the biggest we've seen on a budget handset, which usually have 4in screens at best. Its resolution of 480x854 means it isn't particularly detailed at just 217 pixels-per-inch. The screen quality is better than we expected, it's a little muted but colours look accurate and contrast is good. All that said, we did run the phone at maximum brightness most of the time to get a nice punchy image.
There's a Gorilla Glass panel across the front of phone, so it shouldn't scratch easily. Below the screen are three touch-sensitive buttons for the usual back, home and menu controls – meaning you don't lose onscreen space for virtual buttons. There's a front facing camera for Skype chats and the like, though it only has a basic VGA resolution. It also supports face recognition, so the phone will only unlock when you're looking at it. This worked very well, and we couldn't trick by using a similar-looking person or an image of ourselves on another screen.
CAMERA
The 5-megapixel camera surprised us with its quality. The test shots we took were mainly well exposed and full of detail. It did struggle in low light and its video was far less impressive than its stills though.
This resized shot from the camera is a little dark, but it's still a good effort for a budget snapper. Below you can see a pixel-to-pixel enlargement, where you can see that fine detail is missing - click to enlarge
EMOTION UI
Most manufacturers of budget smartphones leave Android pretty much alone, but Huawei has here used a wide-ranging series of tweaks under the name Emotion UI. The biggest change, and the one that had us flummoxed for some time is that there's no app tray. Instead all your apps sit on your home screens.
Pinch out and you can see all your home screens at once
It's actually not a bad idea, as it means novice users won't have to get their heads around the difference between the app itself and its identical-looking shortcut – a more iPhone style approach. There's no need to install apps and then create shortcuts, just move important apps to more prominent positions, and leave those you rarely use off to one side. You can pinch-to-zoom to see all your home screens, jump to any screen at a tap, or add extra ones for more room.
Here you can see the customisable settings buttons and home screen options
There are also customisable shortcut buttons on the pull-down notifications screen, so you can have just the settings you regularly need. Other than that, it's largely Android 4.1 as you'd expect, feeling slick as ever on the capable hardware inside.
HARDWARE
The Huawei Ascend G510 uses a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8225 Snapdragon S4 chipset; S4 is among the latest of Qualcomm products, though this is among the slowest chipsets in the range. It showed in the SunSpider benchmark with a SunSpider score of 2.513ms. That makes it less than half the speed as the fastest phones; it's not a bad score for a budget phone, but if you're a keen mobile internet user you might want to think about spending more on a better handset.
Basic 3D games won't be a problem, but console-like graphical extravaganzas will struggle here as its GPU only scored 2,622 in 3DMark's Icestorm test. To put this in context it only averaged around 10fps in this demanding test, well short of a smooth 30fps.
The back panel is easy to clip off, letting you get at the slots beneath it
There's NFC built-in for quick and easy file transfers with other such-equipped hardware, and it has a micro SD card slot so you can expand the 1GB of free internal memory with up to a 32GB card. The battery has a 1,700mAh capacity and lasted for a respectable seven hours and 32 minutes in our video playback test.
CONCLUSION
Compared to our long-running favourite the Sony Xperia U, the G510 proves to be faster, partly thanks to a quicker processor, but also due to its use of the slicker Android 4.1. It also has a larger screen – though it has essentially the same resolution as the Xperia U. We feel the two phones complement each other, the Sony is a nicer object and if you want a compact phone it's a great buy, as it now costs around the same as the Huawei.
On pay-as-you-go the G510 is a great smartphone at a very reasonable price, and so wins our Budget Buy award. It does everything that most people want from a smartphone, and its take on Android is pretty easy to get the hang off once you get your head around losing the app tray.
On contract from Vodafone it's not so tempting, with only a meagre contract of 100 minutes and 100MB of data for £13 a month. Older, but far better specified handsets, such as the LG Optimus 4X HD, can be found for little more by shopping around. It now had Android 4.1 too, plus a far superior HD IPS display and a quad-core processor. We found the 4X on a similar contract for just £15.50 per month (£372 over the life of the contract versus £312 for the G510) and would strongly advise you to go for this handset instead.
Details |
|
|---|---|
| Part Code | U8951 |
| Review Date | 19 Apr 2013 |
| Price | £130 |
| Rating |
|
| Award | Budget Buy |
Hardware |
|
|---|---|
| Main display size | 4.5in |
| Native resolution | 480x854 |
| CCD effective megapixels | 5-megapixel |
| GPS |
|
| Internal memory | 4096MB |
| Memory card support | microSD |
| Memory card included | 0MB |
| Operating frequencies | GSM 850/900/1800/1900, 3G 900/2100 |
| Wireless data | GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA |
| Size | 134x67x9.9mm |
| Weight | 150g |
Features |
|
|---|---|
| Operating system | Android 4.1 (JellyBean) |
| Microsoft Office compatibility | N/A |
| FM Radio |
|
| Accessories | USB Charger, headphones |
| Talk time | 6 hours |
| Standby time | 340 days |
Buying Information |
|
|---|---|
| Price on contract | £13 per month contract |
| Prepay price | £130 |
| SIM-free supplier | N/A |
| Contract/prepay supplier | www.vodafone.co.uk |
| Details | www.huaweidevice.co.uk |
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