Huawei Ascend D2 Review

Key Features: 5in 1080p screen; Quad-core 1.5GHz processor

Huawei Ascend D2 Review

Huawei Ascend D2 - Design and Specs

Huawei is known to most as a budget brand, but over the last year it has been quickly moving up gears. The Huawei Ascend D2 is a sympton of this move – it's a high-spec phone with features that should, in theory at least, worry Samsung and co. We got a closer look at the phone to see if it's worth getting excited about.

Huawei claims the Ascend D2 is the sort of phone that will stop you needing to take a laptop with you much of the time. It offers a large 5-inch screen, a powerful quad-core 1.5GHz processor and an impressive-sounding 13-megapixel camera.

Huawei Ascend D2 Design

In-hand, the Huawei Ascend D2 doesn't immediately scream quality, though. Like the Samsung Galaxy S3, the phone has a plastic rear that comes to define the feel of the phone. 

However, ergonomically it is sound, with a lightly curved rear that softens the D2's shape, and the sides of the phone are metal rather than plastic. This should give the phone a higher-end feel than an entirely plastic phone, but in the warm environs of CES 2013 where the Huawei Ascend D2 was launched, the benefits of metal weren't too apparent.

As it uses a non-removable battery cover, it avoids some of the creaky potential of poorly implements sheets of plastic. It's a solid-feeling phone. What it arguably lacks, though, is much of a design personality. 

The Huawei Ascend D2 is mostly screen, with no soft keys and no notable design accents. Even the camera lens and single-LED flash on the rear – often used to give phones a little personality – are entirely innocuous.

Huawei has often produced phones that are popular among geeky enthusiasts, their low prices attracting crowds of hackers looking to further boost what they can do for so little money. These fans may be less than impressed to hear that the Huawei Ascend D2 does not offer expandable memory, although the internal memory is a fairly generous 32GB. In attempting to class up their act with hints of Apple and Samsung phone flavour, a few followers may end up feeling alienated.

The Huawei Ascend D2 keeps its hardware design pure and simple, minimising the number of ports and buttons used. Even the microSIM slot sits under an Apple-like metal panel. The side benefit of this design methodology is that the phone is nearly water and dustproof. It's certified to withstand sprays of water and dust, and Huawei's Richard Yu claims it can survive being dunked in water. There are no rubber seals, as you'd find in a fully-fledged tough phone, though.

Huawei Ascend D2 Specs

Although there are some flexibility trade-offs here, the core specs of the phone are hard to find fault with. Huawei claims the D2 is the “most powerful smartphone”, and while we'll wait for the benchmarks to see if it's true, general performance is excellent. The Huawei Ascend D2 has a quad-core 1.5GHz processor backed-up by 2GB of RAM. Although sure to be superseded soon, it's at the top of its game.

We noticed no significant lag in operation, in spite of the phone's use of a custom user interface that Huawei calls the Emotion UI.

Huawei Ascend D2 - Camera, Software and Battery Life

Huawei Ascend D2 Software

The Huawei Ascend D2 runs Android Jelly Bean at its core, and on top sits the Emotion UI. This adds a bunch of minor additional features to Android, such as Face Recognition in the gallery app, but also fundamentally changes the way the OS is arranged.

Rather than maintaining the two-part structure, of home screens and the apps menu, all the phone's features are bunged into non-deletable folders on one of the Huawei Ascend D2's home screens. In a very basic sense, it's a half-way house between iOS and Android. However, it's something that may initially confuse long-term Android users.

There are a few instances of this playing fast and loose with the rules of Android. For example. You can flick away the Android Jelly Bean nav bar, and once it's hidden it's not entirely clear how you should navigate (remember, there are no hardware soft keys). This feature is there presumably to show off the impressive 5-inch screen as much as possible

Huawei Ascend D2 Screen

It is right to show off the Ascend D2's screen too – it's mightily impressive. Five inches across and Full-HD resolution, its specs match the very best phones announced. It uses a variant of IPS technology rather than AMOLED, and is both dazzlingly bright and flawlessly sharp.

The only argument that can be made against the Huawei Ascend D2's screen is that its resolution is well into diminishing returns. Huawei's Richard Yu admits he can't tell between a 300-odd dpi screen and the 443dpi of the Ascend, and we're hitting the wall of meaningful progress at this point. There's work to be done on contrast and screen reflectivity still, but the phone performs well on these fronts too.

Huawei Ascend D2 Camera

The impressive-sounding specs continue with the Huawei Ascend D2's cameras. There are two of them, the main rear one using a 13.-megapixel sensor, wide f/2.2 aperture and a single-LED flash.

We didn't get to assess the image quality of the shots, but there's little of the shutter lag seen in the last Huawei phone we reviewed, the budget Huawei Ascend G330. Focusing speed and shutter times weren't quite a match for the iPhone 5's, but that could have been down in part to the lighting of the environment. We'll be back with the full conclusion in our review.

Huawei Ascend D2 Battery Life

Topping off the impressive feature list for the Huawei Ascend D2 is battery. It has a 3000mAh battery, significantly larger than the Samsung Galaxy S3's 2100mAh unit – without an immediately noticeable weight sacrifice too.

Huawei says that the phone will last for a solid two days thanks to a combination of this generous capacity and power management optimisations. To top it off Huawei claims the Ascend D2 charges 25 per cent more quickly than the Samsung Galaxy S3. With the scent of fierce competition in the air, we'll wait until we get our review handset in before coming to any conclusions.

Can the Huawei Ascend D2 really compete with the Samsung Galaxy S4? Commercially at least, it seems unlikely. Without Samsung's brand cache and with those lingering ties in the minds of many to the brand's budget origins, the phone may struggle if priced anything less than extremely aggressively. We're also not convinced all of its UI tweaks will be considered bonuses by everyone. However, that does not mean Huawei has produced anything less than an excellent phone in the Ascend D2, even if it doesn't have its own personality to speak of.