Huawei Ascend Mate review

Key Features: Android 4.2.1 with custom UI; 8GB internal memory; 2GB RAM; Quad-core Huawei 1.5GHz CPU; 6.1-inch IPS+ 720p screen

Huawei Ascend Mate Review

What is the Huawei Ascend Mate?

Many a loving person would tell a partner who has put on some weight that there’s simply “more to love.” However, everyone has a limit.

The question is – has the mobile phone obsession with screen size gone overboard with the Huawei Ascend Mate? It has a 6.1-inch screen, making it much bigger than giant phones like the Samsung Galaxy S4.

It’s a bold device with a high-quality screen and a huge battery, but we’re not convinced that its screen size has enough merits to outweigh the issues for most people.

Huawei Ascend Mate – Video Review

If you want a closer look at the Huawei Ascend Mate, check out our video review below.

Huawei Ascend Mate – Design

The Huawei Ascend Mate is a huge phone. It has a 6.1-inch screen, which Huawei claims is the largest a phone can get before becoming too big. But it would say that, wouldn’t it?

To be fair to the Ascend Mate, it is a phone that most will be able to hold one-handed comfortably enough, although stretching a thumb from one end of the screen’s bottom to the other feels like finger aerobics. 

Huawei has made a few small nods to those who do not suffer from gigantism, by placing the volume rocker buttons and the power button a way down the right edge – within reach for most. However, there’s no getting away from how huge the phone is.

It’s 85mm wide and 163mm long. That’s 20 per cent longer in each direction than the Galaxy S4, which is already a large mobile. At 9.9mm it’s not desperately slim, either. It’s a real pocket-filler.

In-use what we found much more worrying than the inconvenience of its size is the inherent danger of treating the Ascend Mate like a normal phone. As it’s such a enormous slab, your grip over it is much less sure than with a smaller mobile, which led to many moments when we almost dropped the thing.

However, the Huawei Ascend Mate is a well-made phone, with no sign of creakiness or worrying gaps around seams. But it’s not made of particularly snazzy materials either. Its non-removable rear plate is slightly-curved, textured plastic, and its sides are slightly ‘champagne’ colour plastic. The rear is has a soft-touch finish, though, which is comfy on the fingers.

There’s no metal on show and the square body shape doesn’t leave the Huawei Ascend Mate with a distinct style. As there are no hardware nav buttons, the front is even more innocuous. It’s just a curiously giant expanse of black, when the screen’s off. 

Hardware-wise, the Ascend Mate is defined by its size and little else.

The Huawei Ascend Mate has microSD and microSIM slots, which sit on the phone’s left edge and top under non-showy plastic flaps. They don’t have the immaculate feel of the pop-out trays used by the iPhone and Nokia Lumia phones, and don’t have the waterproofing of the Xperia Z’s flaps either.

The Huawei Ascend Mate – it’s big, but not particularly clever, design-wise. It’s partly true on the inside too, as the phone cuts out NFC and 4G to offer all those screen inches for under £350.

It also doesn't have masses of storage, with 8GB in our review model that's wound down to just under 5GB of accessible storage.

Huawei Ascend Mate – Screen

On to the main event, the screen. The Huawei Ascend Mate has a 6.1-inch screen, but surprisingly it’s lower in resolution than many of today’s top smaller phones.

The Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One and others have 4.7-inch to 5-inch screens that are Full HD resolution, but the Huawei Ascend Mate is ‘only’ 720p.

However, unless you look very close and strain your peepers, you wouldn’t know the difference. Display quality is strong too, using an IPS-plus panel whose images pop with excellent colour reproduction, great brightness and nigh-on perfect viewing angles.

There’s a vital immediacy to the Huawei Ascend Mate’s images that silences most complaints about resolution. Text on a high-contrast background is noticeably less smooth than it would be on a higher pixel density screen, though.

The big question is whether the size of the screen has benefits that negate the problems of the sheer girth of the phone. We’re not convinced it does.

It has no digitser layer, so is not compatible with pressure-sensitive styluses, and its size increment over the 5.5-inch Galaxy Note 2 does make it a good deal larger.

Huawei Ascend Mate - Software, Apps and Games

Huawei Ascend Mate – Software Tweaks for Screen

The phone runs a customised version of Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean. And some of the tweaks applied try to make the giant screen a little easier to live with.

Perhaps the most important is the custom Huawei keyboard. A button in the Settings menu lets you enable a keyboard designed for one-handed use, because the screen is simply too wide to navigate across with a single thumb.

The keyboard is shrunk down to occupy about three fifths of the screen in portrait, making every key accessible with the one thumb. It doesn’t look great, but it does work. The dial pad gets the same treatment, and you can switch between either the full-size or shrunken keyboard in Settings at any time.

A slightly more dynamic accessibility feature is the suspend button. This is a widgety button that hangs around on a spot at the edge of the screen – you choose where – that, when clicked, brings up shortcuts to the messenger, gallery, note app and calculator.

Huawei Ascend Mate – Software

As well as making some mostly-successful stabs at tweaking the operation of that mammoth screen, the custom Huawei interface also changes how Android operates in a very significant way. It ditches the apps menu entirely.


All of your apps, including basics like Settings and the Dialler, are laid out on your home screens. They’re initially dropped into folders, and anyone who has used Android a lot before is likely to find it initially disconcerting.

You can even make the software nav bar hide itself if you really want to confuse yourself and others.

There are a few of these curious choices, whose execution is less-than-perfect, and they ensure that the Huawei interface feels a bit wonky in use.

One of its neat features, though, is how much you can tweak its appearance. The Huawei Ascend mate comes with 20 themes, which alter the lock screen, the background, the clock widget and the app icons. None fundamentally change how Huawei’s take on Android works, but they certainly do look different. 

And, like the optional disappearing nav bar and the lack of apps menu, the altering of icons can be massively confusing. Is that the dialler or the messenger app? Or maybe the calendar?

The Huawei Ascend Mate’s UI can certainly do ‘cute’, but it’s also pretty good at ‘confounding’ if you don’t watch your fiddling.

Huawei Ascend Mate – Performance, Apps and Games

With a quad-core Huawei-designed K3V2 quad-core 1.5GHz CPU processor, the Huawei  Ascend Mate has a pretty powerful chipset. And it matches the top phones of today with 2GB of RAM.

However, we did notice a few real-life issues with the phone’s performance. Some games displayed serious graphical issues that we wouldn’t expect with a better-known phone. Real Racing 3, for example, has serious texture distortion and a worse frame rate than we’d expect from a phone of this grade.

It’s likely that some of these issues will be ironed-out before too long, but show that this probably isn’t the phone to get if gaming is high-priority for you. As an abstracted test of what the Ascend mate is capable of, we put it through a handful of benchmarks.

In the AnTuTu test, it came out with 15,616 points – comparable with the Galaxy Note 2 and its quad-core 1.6GHz Exynos 4412 CPU. Its chipset architecture isn’t as advanced as the Krait and Cortex-A15 CPUs found in the very latest phones, though. Once again, it’s one step behind the top mobile players, but then it does cost a good £150-200 less than they do.

Huawei Ascend Mate – Web Browsing

The slightly disappointing performance carries on when browsing the web, which should really be a low-intensity task. Using the stock browser, there was occasional baffling lag when entering text to the address bar, and backing this up the Sunspider javascript benchmark came up with inconsistent results between the ho-hum 2,000ms and a frankly terrible 4,000ms.


There are other annoyances in the way the browser operates, such as the iPhone-apeing insistence of making you insert web addresses only rather than keywords into the address bar – by not letting you insert spaces. This is actually down to the way the Huawei keyboard works, but it's nevertheless annoying.

The keyboard also takes an all-too-aggressive approach to predictive typing, leading to the creation of unwanted new sentences if you don't tap its predicted words. Thankfully, the keyboard can be replaced using third-party apps.

Other than the stock browser, Huawei Ascend Mate also comes with the Chrome browser installed, a standard feature of Android 4.1.2. It performs a little better in-use than the standard browser, with less lag. However, its Sunspider results were disappointing too, at around 2,000ms when we’d expect a processor of the Ascend Mate’s grade to score closer to 1,200-1,300ms.

Huawei Ascend Mate - Camera, Video, Battery Life and Verdict

Huawei Ascend Mate – Camera

As we saw with Ascend Mate’s screen resolution, the phone’s camera is one step below the mobile game’s top players. It has an 8-megapixel camera when the top dogs use 13-megapixel snappers.

The level of detail captured is very good, especially for a phone that’s not ostensibly camera-oriented. However, its photos do appear seriously processed in some respects.

Contrast and sharpness and significantly are boosted to make the shots appear lively and bold – this is in the standard shooting mode too, with all additional settings set to automatic. A closer look reveals that they also look quite grainy and artificial, though.




That additional image ‘pop’ will come in handy for online showing-off, though. Macro skills are commendable too, as the Huawei Ascend Mate has no trouble honing-in on subjects around 5cm away. That’s much close than most phones can manage. If only the resulting shots looked a little more natural, this would be a seriously commendable camera.

It may some impress image quality obsessives, but there’s a good amount of fun to be had with the Ascend Mate’s camera. It offers a good array of modes, including panorama and HDR, as well as plenty of fun filters. These include face-distorting ones – classic Facebook fodder.

Huawei Ascend Mate – Music and Video

One thing that should definitely benefit from the Ascend Mate’s giant screen is movie and TV watching. However, its video player app isn’t much cop.

Fresh out of the box, the phone refused to play half of our test videos and chugged through others – not what we’d expect from a quad-core phone.

To get videos playing reliably, you’ll need to install a third-party media player like Mx Player – and perhaps thanks to its custom processor, most needed to use processor-intensive software rendering rather than hardware acceleration. 

The Huawei Ascend Mate has an unadorned music player app too, although the phone does come with Dolby Digital Plus sound optimisation too. This is an EQ mode that, much like the Beats mode seen in HTC phones, makes music sound a little more vital. It’s better than Beats too, with an array of EQ presets rather than just a juvenile bass-boosting one.

Without Dolby mode engaged, upper mids sound a little forced, leading to coarse-sounding vocals – which makes us wonder if the non-Dolby mode has been made to sound worse deliberately. Dolby applies a volume boost too, which gives an instant impression of improvement. It’s a much-needed volume boost too as otherwise the headphone output’s volume is fairly low.

Huawei Ascend Mate – Internal Speaker

For such a large phone, the Ascend Mate’s internal speaker is a little disappointing. It’s output is mono, so you won’t get any sort of impression of stereo sound when watching a movie in landscape (unlike, for example, the HTC One), and top volume is average.

The sound doesn’t distort at top volume, though, and while there’s no real bass and treble detail is as limited as you’d expect from a teeny speaker driver, it’s tonally inoffensive enough.

Huawei Ascend Mate – Call Quality

Taking calls on the Ascend Mate is sure to earn you some derision from friends, but it’s up to the task. Call quality is clear – if not any louder than a ‘normal-size’ phone – and it uses a secondary microphone that sits on the phone’s top edge to use active noise cancellation on the other end of the line.

The second mic listens to ambient noise, which the phone then cuts from the signal before it reaches whoever you’re calling.

Huawei Ascend Mate – Battery Life

The Huawei Ascend Mate has a giant battery befitting of its huge frame. It’s a 4,050mAh unit that dwarfs virtually all others. The Galaxy Note 2 has a 3,100mAh battery, for example, and the Galaxy S4 a comparatively piddly 2,600mAh unit.

The reason for using such a huge unit is, obviously, that 6.1-inch screen and stamina is largely dependent on how bright you set the backlight and how much the screen is turned on. With default settings, the backlight is set high to show off how dazzling the display can be, and intensive use will see the battery drain down in a day.

Make that screen look more ordinary by dimming the automatic brightness and you’ll get a solid day and a half, or two days with close management of your connections. It's well above average in this regard, however you need to make your own tweaks for the best results. The phone doesn’t seem to use as intelligent power management as some others, despite having an intelligent power-saving mode, so the 4,050mAh battery won’t ever supply truly eye-opening stamina for many.

Huawei Ascend Mate – Value

Selling at £335, the Huawei Ascend Mate is a lot cheaper than the top-end 5-inch phones, like the Galaxy S4, and cheaper than the Galaxy Note 2 when that phone arrived last year. However, we should stress that the Note 2 is a device of a different, higher class – one that knows much better how to make its large screen seem a boon rather than an inconvenience.

The Huawei Ascend Mate has an excellent quality screen, especially given it suffers from some technical limitations. However, at 6.1 inches it lives in an uncomfortable middle ground between phone and tablet that sees it poke out of pockets, be a little too easy to drop and attract ridicule at every turn. It simply needs a more convincing reason why its screen should be that big. 

Verdict

The Huawei Ascend Mate is a phone with a massive screen and a big battery. If that sounds like your idea of heaven, and you have giant hands, this phone offers a pretty sweet deal for £340. However, its general appeal is much less obvious than a large-screen phone like the Galaxy Note 2, and we found its extra inches as often an annoyance as a help.