CyberKID
In search for Tech Gyan!
I bought a Huawei Ascend P1 (U9200) a few days back. Have used the device for quite some time now, so putting up my review of this device.
Ordered this phone on 11th of August for Rs. 12,490, and received it on 19th August. I placed an order for this phone after doing extensive comparisions with similarly priced devices already available in the Indian market (I skipped the devices from Indian manufacturers for obvious reasons). First of all, the looks are simply stunning. The phone's got a good slim and sleek look, sharp edgy design, contrasting colour combination of the white coloured device, which looks pretty good. Here's my review of this device:
The Design: The design of this phone is simple, to say the least. This is a unibody phone, thus meaning that there are no user removable parts inside like the battery. Since it was a flagship device for Huawei which launched it in the CES, Las Vegas, in 2012, and at that time, this was one of the first devices to have the Android 4.0 ICS. The design has been kept minimalistic, with sharp protruding edges, the front is black coloured with the top of the phone showing off the front speaker grille in black colour, and below that is the chrome finished HUAWEI brand name. On the right side is the 1.3mp secondary camera that is capable of shooting at 1280x720p stills as well as videos, and also a variety of other sensors like the proximity and the ambient light sensor. At the bottom of this device are the three capacitive buttons for Home, Menu and Back (no physical buttons). The phone dons a Corning Gorilla Glass in the front. There are chrome plated plastic buttons at the sides, with the left side of the phone having the two volume rocker keys, right side having the Power button, the MicroSD card bay, and the top having the USB-cum-MHL port, the Sim card slot, and the 3.5mm audio jack. The USB port doubles or rather triples as the Charging port-cum-USB Port-cum-the MHL port for TV out. I however didn't like this approach, as there is too much use of the single USB port, thus, drastically reducing its life span. The bottom of the phone houses just a small hole for the primary microphone. The back of the phone has the 8mp Autofocus camera with dual led flash, and a secondary microphone used for active noise cancellation. At the bottom is a budge, which probably hides the speaker, which again can be heard from a small grilled space on this budge. Build quality wise, the device is quite well built.
Here are a few shots, I took while unboxing the device, sorry for poor shots, as I took it in low light indoors, without even knowing what is being captured (my nokia C6-00's screen has blacked out, so I can't see a thing in that)
*i.imgur.com/5xp99dKl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/yVQfJ25l.jpg
*i.imgur.com/6Rh1h5ql.jpg
*i.imgur.com/KnVxIe9l.jpg
*i.imgur.com/KYS1I46l.jpg
*i.imgur.com/QkhUp5Cl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/urTrpAwl.jpg
The Hardware:
These specifications are directly from Huawei's Product Page for Ascend P1 here.
One thing, worthy of mentioning, and that is the RAM. The system, and other utilities too, report the total system RAM to be 659.2MB (the remaining around 340MB of RAM is used for OS, the dedicated graphics chip and other features.
The user experience: This is my first android device, so, I am pretty much astonished by the speed of the device. Earlier I was using the Nokia C6-00, that had a 434MHz processor and a mere 128MB of RAM, so, moving to a device like this is really a stunning experience. Not that I didn't liked it, but was used to it, and faced almost no issues with it, even with that slow hardware, having a much faster device at a price lower than it was great. The display is crisp and vivid. The colour reproduction is great, everyone I showed this device to remarked the same about the display. The 540x960px resolution is great, and considering the pricepoint one is getting this device, you can't ask for more. And you don't have to ask about the viewing angles-it's absolutely stunning. My experience with the software as well as the hardware was great. I didn't have too much expectations because of using an old device, this device works like a charm. As far as the OS and software is concerned, the phone comes preloaded with Android 4.0.3 ICS, with a very minimal of tweaks by Huawei (as others are saying), so, one can expect a near to stock android experience. Huawei has already announced that the JellyBean update is in works, so it will be available in recent future. Their EmotionUI 1.5 is available for the Ascend P1. Both however, aren't available yet in India (atleast I couldn't find it), so I'm expecting a couple of weeks more for the same to be available.
There seems to be some confusion with the battery capacity, particularly with flipkart, which lists this device as having a battery capacity of 1800mAh, while the most other sites rate it at 1670mAh, and to add to the confusion, Huawei India site has completely missed this on at the product specifications page. The battery lasts quite a bit, and may last for a whole day over a low to moderate usage. The touch keypad is quite good, and even for a person like me, who never used a software keypad, even after having a capability to use one, it's good. I was able to type quite well at somewhat good speed and with less errors. The phone turns the keypad according to the orientation and in landscape orientation, the keypad is quite large, so much co that it somewhat hides the space to completely see what you're typing. The sensors (I don't know why) sometimes do not turn the device's orientation even after turning the device's physical orientation. I missed one more useful feature from my Nokia C6-00, on this android device. The capability to snooze or silent a call in a turned down mode. (Turning the device face down in my Nokia C6-00 made a call silent, and also snoozed the alarm (though I never used to snooze the alarm, coz, it'll anyway disturb me after some time .
Camera Performance: A lot has already been said about the mediocre camera performance of this device, and I somewhat agree with it. The 8MP camera isn't doing great work, as I expected from it (being a BSI sensor at heart). The most intriguing part of camera on this device is somewhat related to software (I think). The biggest problem is with the Autofocus, which most of the time, isn't accurate, and the sensor takes way too much time to focus, so, you could end up with blurry pics. There's however the touch to focus feature, but this too, isn't very promising. It too fails to focus very well, and ends up being out of focus many a times. The low light performance is again below what I would call mediocre, infact, for closeups, it's bad. The shots captured in low light are very grainy, and thus, are low on quality. The flash fails to give a performance boost under low light conditions. One thing worthy of mention is that the camera isn't very good at taking closeup shots. It ends making the shots flat, and over saturated (mostly in case of bright colours like red, yellow, etc). I drastically missed a lot of advanced control features that my Nokia C6-00 had. It used to have a sharpness adjustment feature, which would let me get sharp edges and visibly finer details, lines, and contours, which is missing here, the AutoFocus, somehow works very differently than it used to on my Nokia C6. There are a number of pre existing modes including Panorama, HDR, Group and such, but what I missed here is a macro mode, as I like taking closeup shots, which, my Nokia C6-00 was very good at. Video wise, the main camera is capable of shooting at Full HD @ 1920x1080p at 25-30 fps, and the video quality is pretty much acceptable, while the secondary front facing cam can shoot at 1280x720p.
Here are a few shots from a few of my captures. You can compare these shots with others I have captured from my old Nokia C6-00 at my flickr page, (somewhat same shots are available there on my blog too
)
1. No Light captures (Night): Taken after 8pm
*i.imgur.com/urKAjNLl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/oq7X0Znl.jpg
2. Low light captures (Morning): Taken before 7am
*i.imgur.com/qihJA3Gl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/P67HoXul.jpg
*i.imgur.com/dttruOtl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/bcsnmLrl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/s5LxY5rl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/6T00kOBl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/fPxzm2Tl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/xxtu2nSl.jpg
3. Day light captures: Taken after 7am
*i.imgur.com/tJiZwskl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/3pff6URl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/FAJVJFMl.jpg
Audio Performance: The phone is marketed as having Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, but, I didn't find the sound very great. Infact, an older Nokia 5320 XpressMusic at my home still sounds better than this device, so, in my opinion, the Dolby Digital 5.1 sound is just a marketing gimmick, nothing much more. And the bundled earphones are too bad. I couldn't use any of my earlier nokia headsets, as both are not compatible, and same is the case with huawei's headphones in nokia phones. I also used my Philips SHP2700 headphones with this phone, and this too disappointed me.
Bundled Accessories: The bundled (in the box) accessories included a compact charger having a USB port which is rated at 5V, 1Amps, a micro usb data-cum-charger-cable, a good looking but poor sounding set of earphones, that are a pain to use. I liked the compact charger though.
Some Synthetic Benchmarks: I ran a few benchmarks like AnTuTu, and Quadrant, just out of curiosity, to know where my device stands, and here are the results.
AnTuTu Results (Screenshots)
*i.imgur.com/qskZTRJl.png
*i.imgur.com/XRoJl6kl.png
*i.imgur.com/NGV4Nevl.png
Quadrant Results (Screenshots)
Starting the benchmark
*i.imgur.com/w6IcNgEl.png
In the middle of the benchmark
*i.imgur.com/aMuSoRUl.png
*i.imgur.com/UsOF1orl.png
The result
*i.imgur.com/52PAdFkl.png
PROs:
1. Great bang for the buck.
2. Good (if not excellent) hardware specifications.
3. Awesome screen quality, though not HD, the Super AMOLED display works and looks great.
4. Slim form factor.
5. Price.
6. 1080p video capture (I don't remember any other similarly priced device offering this).
CONs:
1. Pretty immature service (I think so).
2. Mediocre camera performance (atleast for still shots).
3. Poor bundled accessories (the headset is bad, really bad
).
4. Non-removable battery.
5. Poor specifications page (incomplete device specifications) on Huawei India site.
6. Non availability of accessories (I couldn't even find a flip cover, may be because the device is quite new)
7. The all-in-one USB port. I particularly am afraid that multiple use of this port will result it going kaput quite soon. I liked Nokia's approach of separate power point for charging the phone.
FINAL VERDICT: Finally I would like to conclude that comparing the specifications and the price (Rs. 12,490), this piece of hardware comes at, it's definitely a steal deal any day I'd say go buy this device, if you're considering buying a similarly priced android device. The turn offs are the poor low light camera performance, and for that, I'm definitely going to get my Nokia C6-00 repaired, until I don't get that Canon EOS 600D. This is a genuine review from my side, after using the device for a few days (3 days to be precise). I hope that my review helps out people in dilemma about buying this device or not.
UPDATE: SOME MEMBER REQUESTS INCLUDED
Have included a few shots as asked by lm2k.
Foliage shots from the park outside my office:
*i.imgur.com/3mSmIax.jpg
*i.imgur.com/zk3GV76.jpg
*i.imgur.com/IW9Tpt8.jpg
*i.imgur.com/YlcmAzi.jpg
UPDATE: 26-09-2013
Upgraded to Emotion UI 1.5 based on Android Jellybean 4.1.1. Things have changed a lot, including some drastic UI changes, functionality changes, bug fixes, etc.
*farm6.staticflickr.com/5549/9961853615_6347cb8757_z.jpg
2013-09-26-17-43-15-549 by CyberK1D, on Flickr
The Home Screen
*farm4.staticflickr.com/3754/9961879834_e58e8e1a16_z.jpg
2013-09-26-17-43-51-424 by CyberK1D, on Flickr
The App Manager page
*farm8.staticflickr.com/7307/9961977093_cdf49a73a1_z.jpg
2013-09-26-17-44-10-003 by CyberK1D, on Flickr
And the system info page
After upgrading to the Emotion UI 1.5, the new android version is 4.1.1 (JB)
I am still disappointed with the night shots, almost all of the closeup shots still end up over exposed.
There might be some more things that have changed for good or bad. It's been just a day since I've upgraded to JellyBean, with EmotionUI 1.5. I'll keep you all updated with other noticeable things that I come across in this new OS upgrade.
Ordered this phone on 11th of August for Rs. 12,490, and received it on 19th August. I placed an order for this phone after doing extensive comparisions with similarly priced devices already available in the Indian market (I skipped the devices from Indian manufacturers for obvious reasons). First of all, the looks are simply stunning. The phone's got a good slim and sleek look, sharp edgy design, contrasting colour combination of the white coloured device, which looks pretty good. Here's my review of this device:
The Design: The design of this phone is simple, to say the least. This is a unibody phone, thus meaning that there are no user removable parts inside like the battery. Since it was a flagship device for Huawei which launched it in the CES, Las Vegas, in 2012, and at that time, this was one of the first devices to have the Android 4.0 ICS. The design has been kept minimalistic, with sharp protruding edges, the front is black coloured with the top of the phone showing off the front speaker grille in black colour, and below that is the chrome finished HUAWEI brand name. On the right side is the 1.3mp secondary camera that is capable of shooting at 1280x720p stills as well as videos, and also a variety of other sensors like the proximity and the ambient light sensor. At the bottom of this device are the three capacitive buttons for Home, Menu and Back (no physical buttons). The phone dons a Corning Gorilla Glass in the front. There are chrome plated plastic buttons at the sides, with the left side of the phone having the two volume rocker keys, right side having the Power button, the MicroSD card bay, and the top having the USB-cum-MHL port, the Sim card slot, and the 3.5mm audio jack. The USB port doubles or rather triples as the Charging port-cum-USB Port-cum-the MHL port for TV out. I however didn't like this approach, as there is too much use of the single USB port, thus, drastically reducing its life span. The bottom of the phone houses just a small hole for the primary microphone. The back of the phone has the 8mp Autofocus camera with dual led flash, and a secondary microphone used for active noise cancellation. At the bottom is a budge, which probably hides the speaker, which again can be heard from a small grilled space on this budge. Build quality wise, the device is quite well built.
Here are a few shots, I took while unboxing the device, sorry for poor shots, as I took it in low light indoors, without even knowing what is being captured (my nokia C6-00's screen has blacked out, so I can't see a thing in that)
*i.imgur.com/5xp99dKl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/yVQfJ25l.jpg
*i.imgur.com/6Rh1h5ql.jpg
*i.imgur.com/KnVxIe9l.jpg
*i.imgur.com/KYS1I46l.jpg
*i.imgur.com/QkhUp5Cl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/urTrpAwl.jpg
The Hardware:
These specifications are directly from Huawei's Product Page for Ascend P1 here.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The user experience: This is my first android device, so, I am pretty much astonished by the speed of the device. Earlier I was using the Nokia C6-00, that had a 434MHz processor and a mere 128MB of RAM, so, moving to a device like this is really a stunning experience. Not that I didn't liked it, but was used to it, and faced almost no issues with it, even with that slow hardware, having a much faster device at a price lower than it was great. The display is crisp and vivid. The colour reproduction is great, everyone I showed this device to remarked the same about the display. The 540x960px resolution is great, and considering the pricepoint one is getting this device, you can't ask for more. And you don't have to ask about the viewing angles-it's absolutely stunning. My experience with the software as well as the hardware was great. I didn't have too much expectations because of using an old device, this device works like a charm. As far as the OS and software is concerned, the phone comes preloaded with Android 4.0.3 ICS, with a very minimal of tweaks by Huawei (as others are saying), so, one can expect a near to stock android experience. Huawei has already announced that the JellyBean update is in works, so it will be available in recent future. Their EmotionUI 1.5 is available for the Ascend P1. Both however, aren't available yet in India (atleast I couldn't find it), so I'm expecting a couple of weeks more for the same to be available.
There seems to be some confusion with the battery capacity, particularly with flipkart, which lists this device as having a battery capacity of 1800mAh, while the most other sites rate it at 1670mAh, and to add to the confusion, Huawei India site has completely missed this on at the product specifications page. The battery lasts quite a bit, and may last for a whole day over a low to moderate usage. The touch keypad is quite good, and even for a person like me, who never used a software keypad, even after having a capability to use one, it's good. I was able to type quite well at somewhat good speed and with less errors. The phone turns the keypad according to the orientation and in landscape orientation, the keypad is quite large, so much co that it somewhat hides the space to completely see what you're typing. The sensors (I don't know why) sometimes do not turn the device's orientation even after turning the device's physical orientation. I missed one more useful feature from my Nokia C6-00, on this android device. The capability to snooze or silent a call in a turned down mode. (Turning the device face down in my Nokia C6-00 made a call silent, and also snoozed the alarm (though I never used to snooze the alarm, coz, it'll anyway disturb me after some time
.Camera Performance: A lot has already been said about the mediocre camera performance of this device, and I somewhat agree with it. The 8MP camera isn't doing great work, as I expected from it (being a BSI sensor at heart). The most intriguing part of camera on this device is somewhat related to software (I think). The biggest problem is with the Autofocus, which most of the time, isn't accurate, and the sensor takes way too much time to focus, so, you could end up with blurry pics. There's however the touch to focus feature, but this too, isn't very promising. It too fails to focus very well, and ends up being out of focus many a times. The low light performance is again below what I would call mediocre, infact, for closeups, it's bad. The shots captured in low light are very grainy, and thus, are low on quality. The flash fails to give a performance boost under low light conditions. One thing worthy of mention is that the camera isn't very good at taking closeup shots. It ends making the shots flat, and over saturated (mostly in case of bright colours like red, yellow, etc). I drastically missed a lot of advanced control features that my Nokia C6-00 had. It used to have a sharpness adjustment feature, which would let me get sharp edges and visibly finer details, lines, and contours, which is missing here, the AutoFocus, somehow works very differently than it used to on my Nokia C6. There are a number of pre existing modes including Panorama, HDR, Group and such, but what I missed here is a macro mode, as I like taking closeup shots, which, my Nokia C6-00 was very good at. Video wise, the main camera is capable of shooting at Full HD @ 1920x1080p at 25-30 fps, and the video quality is pretty much acceptable, while the secondary front facing cam can shoot at 1280x720p.
Here are a few shots from a few of my captures. You can compare these shots with others I have captured from my old Nokia C6-00 at my flickr page, (somewhat same shots are available there on my blog too
)1. No Light captures (Night): Taken after 8pm
*i.imgur.com/urKAjNLl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/oq7X0Znl.jpg
2. Low light captures (Morning): Taken before 7am
*i.imgur.com/qihJA3Gl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/P67HoXul.jpg
*i.imgur.com/dttruOtl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/bcsnmLrl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/s5LxY5rl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/6T00kOBl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/fPxzm2Tl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/xxtu2nSl.jpg
3. Day light captures: Taken after 7am
*i.imgur.com/tJiZwskl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/3pff6URl.jpg
*i.imgur.com/FAJVJFMl.jpg
Audio Performance: The phone is marketed as having Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, but, I didn't find the sound very great. Infact, an older Nokia 5320 XpressMusic at my home still sounds better than this device, so, in my opinion, the Dolby Digital 5.1 sound is just a marketing gimmick, nothing much more. And the bundled earphones are too bad. I couldn't use any of my earlier nokia headsets, as both are not compatible, and same is the case with huawei's headphones in nokia phones. I also used my Philips SHP2700 headphones with this phone, and this too disappointed me.
Bundled Accessories: The bundled (in the box) accessories included a compact charger having a USB port which is rated at 5V, 1Amps, a micro usb data-cum-charger-cable, a good looking but poor sounding set of earphones, that are a pain to use. I liked the compact charger though
.Some Synthetic Benchmarks: I ran a few benchmarks like AnTuTu, and Quadrant, just out of curiosity, to know where my device stands, and here are the results.
AnTuTu Results (Screenshots)
*i.imgur.com/qskZTRJl.png
*i.imgur.com/XRoJl6kl.png
*i.imgur.com/NGV4Nevl.png
Quadrant Results (Screenshots)
Starting the benchmark
*i.imgur.com/w6IcNgEl.png
In the middle of the benchmark
*i.imgur.com/aMuSoRUl.png
*i.imgur.com/UsOF1orl.png
The result
*i.imgur.com/52PAdFkl.png
PROs:
1. Great bang for the buck.
2. Good (if not excellent) hardware specifications.
3. Awesome screen quality, though not HD, the Super AMOLED display works and looks great.
4. Slim form factor.
5. Price.
6. 1080p video capture (I don't remember any other similarly priced device offering this).
CONs:
1. Pretty immature service (I think so).
2. Mediocre camera performance (atleast for still shots).
3. Poor bundled accessories (the headset is bad, really bad
).4. Non-removable battery.
5. Poor specifications page (incomplete device specifications) on Huawei India site.
6. Non availability of accessories (I couldn't even find a flip cover, may be because the device is quite new)
7. The all-in-one USB port. I particularly am afraid that multiple use of this port will result it going kaput quite soon. I liked Nokia's approach of separate power point for charging the phone.
FINAL VERDICT: Finally I would like to conclude that comparing the specifications and the price (Rs. 12,490), this piece of hardware comes at, it's definitely a steal deal any day I'd say go buy this device, if you're considering buying a similarly priced android device. The turn offs are the poor low light camera performance, and for that, I'm definitely going to get my Nokia C6-00 repaired, until I don't get that Canon EOS 600D.
This is a genuine review from my side, after using the device for a few days (3 days to be precise). I hope that my review helps out people in dilemma about buying this device or not.UPDATE: SOME MEMBER REQUESTS INCLUDED
Have included a few shots as asked by lm2k.
Foliage shots from the park outside my office:
*i.imgur.com/3mSmIax.jpg
*i.imgur.com/zk3GV76.jpg
*i.imgur.com/IW9Tpt8.jpg
*i.imgur.com/YlcmAzi.jpg
UPDATE: 26-09-2013
Upgraded to Emotion UI 1.5 based on Android Jellybean 4.1.1. Things have changed a lot, including some drastic UI changes, functionality changes, bug fixes, etc.
*farm6.staticflickr.com/5549/9961853615_6347cb8757_z.jpg
2013-09-26-17-43-15-549 by CyberK1D, on Flickr
The Home Screen
*farm4.staticflickr.com/3754/9961879834_e58e8e1a16_z.jpg
2013-09-26-17-43-51-424 by CyberK1D, on Flickr
The App Manager page
*farm8.staticflickr.com/7307/9961977093_cdf49a73a1_z.jpg
2013-09-26-17-44-10-003 by CyberK1D, on Flickr
And the system info page
After upgrading to the Emotion UI 1.5, the new android version is 4.1.1 (JB)
- The most important and noticable thing is the change in the UserInterface. The menu has been done away with, that means, all your apps, and widgets are now on your home screens (I don't know whether it's good or a bad think, but as far as my preference goes, it's not good at all)
- The 2D and 3D homescreens are also done away with, and instead you are getting a number of themes and transitions, that include both 2D and 3D transitions.
- The Notification panel at the top now shoes a number of frequently used settings that earlier were required navigation to the system settings menu to access.
- The top right hand side notification area now also displays the percentage of battery left, along with a graphical battery indication.
- One of the most noticable thing here is the software bug fix for audio. Earlier, the audio quality was drastically bad, but, now, this has been changed for good. Now, you are required to level down the volume to somewhere at around 60-75% to hear the songs/audio comfortably, otherwise, it's too loud.
- There are a few changes in the camera application too. A few features like tap to focus have been worked upon. There's one useful feature also, which allows you to take a photo by double tapping the screen. There seem to be some changes in the video capture too, but, bugs still continue to bother, maybe, because of my class 4 memory card. A video pause button has been added. However, the application still hangs in between capturing the video, and you can't stop recording a video after a while (maybe, after around 15-20 seconds of recording videos).
- A few profiles have been added, namely Normal, Sleep, Meeting and Outdoor, which let you manage the call, sms and other audio notifications.
- One important thing, I just forgot to tell, and that is the system RAM. It has increased to 720MB of total system usable RAM. Earlier, in ICS, it was 660MB.
- A utility to remove all open apps has been added. This can be accessed by long pressing the home button that will show thumbnails of all open apps along with a small button with a brush, that will close all open apps and will show you the amount of system RAM freed. This seems to be a pretty good addition.
I am still disappointed with the night shots, almost all of the closeup shots still end up over exposed.
There might be some more things that have changed for good or bad. It's been just a day since I've upgraded to JellyBean, with EmotionUI 1.5. I'll keep you all updated with other noticeable things that I come across in this new OS upgrade.
Last edited:
