Hey everyone! My branch of the Pocketnow offices are in America, specifically in Boston, so
it?s not often that I get to review a device that hasn?t received an official U.S. carrier
launch. But today, that?s changing. I?m Michael, this is Pocketnow.com, and THIS ? is the Huawei
Ascend P1. One of the thinnest Android phones I?ve ever handled. So let?s review it. It?s
kind of tough to know where to start with the P1. It was announced way back in January,
officially released in May, and it?s flanked -and somewhat overshadowed- by some other
recent Huawei devices, like the Quad, and the Ascend P1S. So it?s part of Huawei?s attempt
to kind of break out of the budget range it?s found itself in, but it?s not the best of
the pack ? so it?s a weird phone. Let?s take a hardware tour here. The P1 stands out from
the pack through sheer force of restraint. It packs a 4.3-inch display, which seems impossibly
small nowadays - maybe a testament to how ridiculous the jumbo-phone phenomenon has
become. It?s a super AMOLED panel supporting 16 million colors, and Huawei has gone with
a resolution of 960 x 540 - that?s qHD, but with a pixel density of 256ppi, it looks better
than you?d expect. Down below, even though this is a phone designed for Android ICS,
we?ve got persistent capacitive buttons for home, menu, and back; just like Samsung did
on the Galaxy S III, the back key is on the right, which may take you some getting used
to. Up above, the Huawei branding, earpiece grill, and the lens for the 1.3MP front-facing
camera. There?s also a notification LED hidden behind the speaker grill, which I always like
to see. I should mention that while my device is black, there are white and pink options
also available. While we?re here, let?s briefly cover what?s under the hood. The P1 is powered
by an OMAP 4460 chipset - a dual-core cortex A9 CPU running at 1.5GHz. That?s backed up
by a gig of RAM, 4GB of onboard storage, and MicroSD expansion up to 32GB. Around back,
there aren?t too many surprises; an 8MP primary shooter with dual LED flash, capable of shooting
video in 1080p. Over to the side, barely visible, is a noice-canceling mic, then there?s the
very pretty, I think, Huawei logo here, and down below on the Nexus S-like hump at the
bottom is the speaker grille. The whole back is finished in a carbon-fiber like pattern,
which helps liven it up a bit, but the feel is straight plastic, and the smooth slippery
material really picks up skin oil readily - you?ll be wiping this one on your shirt
a lot. The real story here is on the sides - every time I let someone hold this phone
they remark at how slim it is, and that?s for good reason. The device isn?t as slim
as the forthcoming P1S, and it doesn?t quite get down to the Motorola Droid RAZR?s 7.1
millimeters, but at 7.7mm, it?s definitely one of the thinnest smartphones out there.
Because it?s such a slim device, though, it feels better in the hand than the wide Droid
RAZR does. Anyway on the sides here we have the MicroSD card slot, standby key up on the
right side, within easy reach of a thumb, Over on the left is just the volume rocker,
down below just the microphone, and up top the SIM slot, 3.5mm headphone jack, and the
USB/charging port. Now, I always find it weird when manufacturers put the charging port up
top, but that?s gonna depend on your personal preference. As for how it feels - well, I?d
call the experience of handling the P1 average. Huawei has sealed the 1670 mAh battery inside
the device, which will be a downer for some of you, but that plus the Corning Gorilla
Glass up front results in a casing that?s very rigid. There?s no creaking or flexing
here; the phone feels solid. It?s a little light at 110g, but because it?s so svelte,
it doesn?t feel too light. It would have been nice if the volume and power keys were metal,
and the protective covers on the MicroSD and SIM trays are very cheap-feeling, but overall,
the device feels good. Huawei is running something very close to a stock Android ICS build with
the P1, with the version I tested running 4.0.3. There is some customization going on
here, though, with Huawei making some tweaks that are both good and bad. On the bad side,
I hate that we have another phone that omits the dedicated multitasking key - this one
duplicates the Galasy S III?s misstep that requires a tap-and-hold on the home button
to bring it up. On the whole, though, I found Huawei?s tweaks to be very useful. First,
we have the lock screen, which vaguely resembles the lock screen on some of the newer builds
of Motorola?s Blur skin. From here we can unlock to the right, or we can jump directly
into camera, messaging, or the phone application. Once we?re in, the next customization that?s
apparent is the toggles in the notification tray; you can turn these off if you want to,
but just like they are in Samsung?s TouchWiz implementation, they?re very handy to have:
toggles exist for WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, Data, and Auto Rotate. We also have the option to
enable a custom-built Huawei launcher called 3D home, which kind of cartoon-ifies the whole
experience. You get these kind of bigger icons, a cube-like switching experience, and the
occasional cutesy animation. Following in that vein, if you hop into the Settings menu
and swipe down to Security, you can also apply this 3D theme to the lock screen as well ? which
does the same thing here. It?s cutesy and some people might find it fun, but I much
prefer the more Holo-like 2D experience. There are options like this scattered throughout
the OS. Also in the settings menu is an option called Fast Boot. This is on by default, and
it shows - the phone booted in just over 5 seconds with this feature enabled, but when
I turned it off, the phone took eight times longer - 40 seconds - to get me to the lock
screen. I didn?t encounter any difference in usability between the two modes, so I left
the device in Fastboot mode for almost my entire time with the device. Overall, I found
responsiveness on the P1 to be superb. The UI delivers a tight, quick experience, with
a minimum of bugs and crashes. After getting used to the 4.8-inch panel on the Galaxy S
III for a few weeks, it took me a day or so to get used to the smaller touch targets on
the P1, but most of the time it wasn?t a problem at all. Where it was a problem, though, was
the keyboard. I keep on jinxing myself; I said the One X keyboard was bad, then I said
the Galaxy S III keyboard was bad ? this keyboard makes me regret talking smack about either
of those. It?s almost unusable. The keyboard looks inviting; it?s got big tall keys that
you can adjust, and a couple different themes to choose from if you don?t like the stock
colors. There?s even a cool feature where you swipe to the side to get to the numeric
keypad. But the minute you start typing on it, the disaster comes to light. The user
dictionary isn?t well-calibrated for English out of the box, and the autocorrect is shamefully
bad. Shortcuts are in inconvenient places, and if you really start going fast, the keyboard
misses keystrokes. These problems even happen with the stock ICS keyboard, which says to
me this is a problem that runs deeper than just the skin. Maybe a later software revision
will fix this, but if you?re a messaging or email hound, I can?t recommend this device
based on keyboard performance. Let?s talk about the camera for a second. The 8MP shooter
on the P1 performed pretty well in my experience. Given enough light, images were sharp and
crisp, with good color saturation. Lower the light, though, and a lot of noise starts to
creep in, with the camera?s focus suffering as well. There?s also a bit of shutter lag
that will cause some blur if you?re not keeping your hands steady - more so than on other
devices I?ve tested recently. The camera also has a hard time deciding what kind of light
level to choose in situations with brightly and dimly lit areas - normally, HDR mode would
be the solution here, but unlike with the Galaxy S III, HDR didn?t seem to make all
that much difference on shots I took with the P1. Also, the field of view of this lens
is narrower, meaning you?ll have to step farther back from your subject than you would using
some other phone cameras. There are the usual array of fun features, like burst shot and
panorama mode, and they work fairly well. Overall, the camera experience is decidedly
average. I tested the Ascend P1 on AT&T, primarily in and around the greater Boston area, and
as far as performance goes, well, keeping with the theme of the day, the P1 did pretty
average. Voice calls were clear and crisp in my testing, with the usual smartphone caveats-
speakerphone performance was a little on the tinny side, and earpiece volume could have
a been a bit louder. Callers said they could hear background noise from a busy city street,
indicating that either Boston is louder than I realize, or the noise-canceling mic isn?t
doing its job as well as it could. But in environments with normal noise levels, the
P1 performed fine as a phone. Reception was fine over HSPA and even EDGE, when I ran into
a few coverage holes in Salem. Battery life was acceptable in my tests; the device should
get average users through a full day, though power users will want to keep a charger handy.
It actually did surprisingly well given the somewhat anemic 1670mAh battery; even after
five hours of heavy use, including initial setup and syncing accounts, plus over an hour
of Spotify streaming, I didn?t get below 50%. I didn?t run into any problems in either the
stock browser or in Google Chrome, both of which loaded sites just fine and did their
jobs as well as they should. Even high-octane apps like Netflix performed well, and managed
to avoid sucking the battery dry while doing so. Gaming performance was just fine on this
device, though with its non-gargantuan display size and lower spec sheet, the P1 wouldn?t
be any gamer?s first choice. Popular titles like Angry Birds Space ran fine, though the
proximity of the softkeys to the display might give you some problems if you really get into
it. My go-to tester, X-Plane 9 flight simular, may not be the most graphically intense game
of the bunch, but it?s still pretty beefy - and the P1 runs it fine. You can see the
full array of benchmarks in my full review at Pocketnow.com. So, for my first Huawei
phone, the Ascend P1 has done okay. It?s a pretty average phone. It?s got a lot going
for it, and it?s also got a few strikes against it. I like that the phone feels slim and slender
in the hand, without feeling too cheap or chintzy, and I like that it fits easily in
the pocket. I like the carbon-fiber-like pattern on the back, that along with the phone?s slimness,
helps it stand out. I like its display, which isn?t the best but certainly isn?t the worst.
I like its snappy UI performance, its reliable software, and the useful tweaks that Huawei
has built in to Android ICS. In fact, I like its software performance overall. And most
of the time, I like its camera. I don?t like the use of the old-style capacitive keys,
or the cumbersome way Huawei requires you to pull up the multitasking screen. I don?t
like the hard corners of the device, which aren?t comfortable in the palm or against
the ear, if you?re talking on the phone. I hate the keyboard, no matter which one I?m
using. And I don?t like that the camera needs ideal conditions to deliver good results much
of the time. Finally, while I don?t really dislike its hardware design overall, I don?t
really like it, either - while it?s slim, it?s very middle of the road. And really,
that?s what defines much of the Ascend P1 experience. Besides the keyboard it doesn?t
really do anything terribly ? but it doesn?t do much excellently, either. It?s a very average,
very mid-range, very unremarkable device. So if that?s what you?re in the market for,
and you value a slim, smaller piece of hardware, the P1 will suit you plenty fine. I give it
a ?. This has been Michael with Pocketnow.com - thanks for watching our review of the Huawei
Ascend P1. Give us a thumbs up her eon youtube if you liked the review, head on over to Pocketnow.com
to read our full review of this device, and if you have a comment, please leave it on
that review, as we don?t generally get to YouTube comments, but we thank you for them
all the same. Follow us on Twitter at Pocketnowtweets, follow me on Twitter at Captain2Phones, and
stay tuned for the next video. As always, thanks for watching!