Huawei Ascend W1 review

Key Features:Microsoft Windows Phone 8 ,  Dual-core 1.2 GHz Krait  ,   4GB, 512 MB RAM ,  5 MP, 2592 х 1944 pixels,  autofocus, LED flash

Huawei Ascend W1

What is the Huawei Ascend W1?

Windows Phone hasn’t exactly taken the world of mobiles by storm and apart from Nokia and, to a lesser extent, HTC, other manufacturers haven't been rushing to make Windows Phone handsets. So it's something of a surprise to see the Huawei Ascend W1 appear with Windows Phone 8 onboard. This mobile is very affordable too, as you can buy it on Pay As You Go from O2 for the very reasonable sum of £110. Despite the low price it actually has a decent specification with a dual-core processor, 4.0inch screen and 5.0MP camera, so is it another impressive budget Windows Phone handset in the mould of the Nokia Lumia 620?

Huawei Ascend W1 - Design

Some of Huawei's budget Android phones have been disappointing in terms of design, mainly due to their dull and plastiky looking finishes. Thankfully the W1 sees the company getting back on track in terms of styling. Like other recent Windows Phone handsets it throws a bit of colour into the mix, with the W1 available in both blue and reddish-pink, both of which look quite striking.

For a budget model the phone is quite slim too, measuring a relatively slender 10.15mm and while it does look a little bit boxy and angular from the rear, the edges are rounded enough for it to feel quite comfortable to hold. It's solid too, with even the snap-on rear battery cover fitting very snugly against the power pack.

As with all Windows Phone mobiles there's a dedicated camera button (mounted on the right hand edge) and this lets you launch the camera from standby just pressing and holding it down, which is a great feature.

The rear cover hides the removable battery as well as the Sim card holder and microSD card slot. The latter in particular is still a bit of a rarity on higher-end Windows Phone models, so it's good to see it included on a budget phone such as this.

Huawei Ascend W1 - Screen

The 4.0inch display that Huawei has used on the W1 has a resolution of 480x800 pixels, which isn’t going to break any records. The quality of the display, though, is actually quite high, especially by budget mobile standards.

It has very wide viewing angles so colours and contrast don’t shift dramatically if you tilt the phone from side to side or up and down, unlike a lot of cheap Android handsets. It's colours may not be as bold as on OLED displays, but they do look warm and natural. Also, at this screen size the display's modest resolution still looks quite sharp, and certainly text is very readable and the live tiles that are a signature of the Windows Phone OS look crisp.

The screen is a bit reflective, but not any more so than most of today's smartphones, and it has enough brightness on tap for it to still be very usable outdoors in direct sunlight.

Huawei Ascend W1 - Usability and Calling

Huawei Ascend W1 - Interface and Usability

For a phone costing a little over a hundred notes the Huawei Ascend W1's hardware isn’t all that modest, as it has a dual core 1.2Ghz processor and Adreno 305 graphics. Huawei has made cut backs on storage though, as it only has 4GB of memory. Nevertheless, the presence of the microSD card slot means that you can use cards of up to 32GB in size to bump this up significantly. However, there is a caveat in that you can't install apps to microSD cards, they have to be stored in main memory, which is a bit of a pain, but not a deal breaker as most apps don’t take up that much space.

The W1 feels pretty zippy to use as it responds pretty much instantly to your taps and swipes and there's almost none of the lag that you usually get on budget Android devices. In fact the only times that you'll notice any real difference in performance between this handset and higher-end Windows Phone models is in the little bit of extra time it takes to open apps or render more complicated websites.

The Windows Phone interface looks very fresh and modern and the tiles approach makes it feel very contemporary. The user interface is essentially split into two parts. There's a main homescreen that scrolls vertically and contains live tiles that show snippets of information or pictures, but if you swipe right you'll find yourself at a list of all available apps, much like the app drawer on Android phones. You can tap and hold on these apps to pin a tile for the app to your homescreen and you can now also resize tiles to a quarter of their usual size and some of them can also be expanded to fill the width of the screen.

Huawei Ascend W1 - Contacts, Browser and Calling

Windows Phone doesn't have a standard contacts list. Instead you'll find all your contacts are grouped together into its People Hub, where you can access not just the usual name, contact number and email address information, but also social media updates from you contacts across services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It’s a great system that's genuinely useful and one of the real strengths of the Windows Phones handsets like this one.

As you'd expect the W1 uses Microsoft's Windows Explorer web browser. This is a fast and powerful browser that has plenty of features including tabbed browsing support and the ability to share pages via social networks, email or messaging services. There's also a handy Find on Page search feature. IE is very responsive to gestures like pinch to zoom, and although the W1 is a little bit slower to render pages than Windows Phone handsets with meatier processors, it'll give any similarly specified Android phone a run for its money. This is borne out in its benchmarks as it completed Sunspider in 1130.5ms and posted a score of 1186 in Browsermark, both of which are very good results for a budget handset.

Call quality on the W1 was pretty good during our time with the phone. Its earpiece is reasonably loud and crisp, so you don’t get the muddiness or robotic speech that some lesser mobiles suffer from. The mic also seemed to do a good job, as we had no complaints about it from callers.

Huawei Ascend W1 - Camera and battery life

Huawei Ascend W1 – Camera

Unlike Nokia's more expensive Lumia 620, the W1 does actually have dual cameras so you can use it for video calling in apps like Skype and Tango, which will be handy for those who travel a lot.

The rear facing, main camera has a 5.0Megapixel sensor as well as features such as autofocus, 720p HD video recording and an LED flash. Like all Windows Phone handsets you can launch the camera even from standby just by pressing and holding on the dedicated camera button on the right hand edge. This is a great feature, especially when you need to quickly capture a snap and haven’t got time to fiddle around with unlock screens and the like.

The camera app gives you control over settings such as ISO and White Balance, but it lacks any fancy built-in filters or special shooting modes. However, you can add these in the form of plug-in 'lenses' that you can download from the Windows Phone Store. There are plenty of free ones including Microsoft's impressive Photosynth 360 panoramic stitcher.

The snapper is a tad slower than high-end phones to find focus, but better than a lot of budget handsets we've use in this regard. It doesn’t suffer too badly from shutter lag either which is a boon when you just want to fire off a quick snap of your mates.

Overall image quality is reasonably good for a budget phone, but the camera does have a tendency to over saturate colours and burn out highlights, especially in sunny conditions.

Huawei Ascend W1 – Apps and Multimedia

One of the advantages of the W1's Windows Phone OS is that the operating system has features built-in that you need to use third party apps for on other platforms. For example, the People Hub lets you check out what your friends and family are up to on sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn without you needing to install apps for these services. Microsoft also includes Mobile Office as part of the OS so you can create, view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files right on the phone. These apps are very useably too and there's integration with Microsoft's SkyDrive service so you can store and share your documents in the cloud.

However, the W1 lacks the extra apps and services you get with Nokia's Windows Phone handsets, such as its Nokia Music service. However, Nokia's Here Drive app is currently in beta testing and is available as a free download so you can add turn by turn navigation to this phone without having to shell out extra dosh.

The picture isn’t so rosy when you go to look for apps in the Windows Phone Store as the shelves are still pretty bare compared to what's available on iOS and Android devices. You can usually find an app to perform the task that you want, but it's not always of the same quality that you now get on Android and iOS devices. Games often take a long time to get released on Windows Phone if they make the transition at all, and there are annoying omissions. For example, the native video player doesn't support common formats like MKV, yet there's no app in the app store that will allow you to play them on the phone.

Huawei Ascend W1 - Battery Life and Connectivity

Huawei has stuck a pretty potent 1950mAh battery in the W1, which is much larger than most budget handset. Typically they use batteries with smaller capacities of anywhere between 1300mAh and 16000mAh.  It's perhaps not surprisingly then that the W1 turns out to be a bit of a star performer in the battery life department. We found we could quite easily get a day and a half out of the phone, and even a bit longer if we made use of the battery saver mode tucked away in the settings menu.

The W1 doesn’t have fancy connectivity options like 4G and NFC support, but most people don't need or want those technologies at present anyway. It does have all the other bases covered though, so you'll find 3G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth onboard.

Verdict
The Huawei Ascend W1 is a cracking little phone. It feels slicker and faster than most budget Android handsets (which are its main competition), has an eye-catching design, long battery life and good call quality. You don’t get access to as many apps as you do on Android or iOS handsets, but if you can live with this then you'll find that at £110 on Pay As you Go from O2 it represents exceptionally good value for money.