Review: Huawei Ascend Mate
Wednesday, October 2, 2013 at 9:24AM 
By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
2013 is shaping up to be the year of large, and I mean really large smartphones. Following in the success of Samsung's Galaxy Note I and II (and III released recently), other manufacturers are pushing out supersized smartphones. The most surprising of all of these is Huawei's Ascend Mate, which comes exclusively to WIND Mobile in Canada. It is now available for $99 on WINDtab or $399 outright.
Phablets were often ridiculed as being outragously clunky and large smartphones that had very few of the benefits of slimmer, lighter and smaller screened counterparts. They are too large for one-handed use, they look awkward when held to one's ear and they just don't fit most pants and jacket pockets. So, why are they so darn popular?
Having used the Huawei Ascend Mate for close to three weeks, I am starting to understand why. I took the Ascend Mate as a backup phone to a trip where I had vatious normal (4-5-inch sized) smartphones in tow as well as an iPad tethered to the Belkin Ultimate Keyboard.
The iPad was great for posting on my blog, writing article drafts and general surfing while the other smartphones were used for specific features (i.e. camera, long battery life).
For some strange reason, I found myself relying more on the Huawei Ascend Mate for general e-mail and web-surfing, looking up maps as well as a general purpose phone for WhatsApp messenger and calls using a Roam Mobility SIM card since the Huawei Ascend Mate was unlocked.
The big draw for me was having a screen that was big enough to consume content while having a device that was still thinner and lighter than a 7-inch or 10-inch tablet.
The device itself is sturdily built with a soft-touch rubber backplate reinforced by a hard plastic or polycarbonate frame. A solid slab of Gorilla Glass covers the entirety of the display, giving it a well-balanced and monolithic look and feel.
The Huawei Ascend Mate provided great cellular coverage in various parts of the US (and also Canada when using my TELUS SIM). I was happy to get consistently good 4G-LTE connectivity where available and often HSPA + when not.
Huawei also did their best to make one-handed use possible on the Huawei Ascend Mate and while it is a bit of a stretch even for someone with larger hands, I did manage to carry out many tasks with one hand.
This included scrolling up and down webpages and Kindle eBooks, thumbing up and down apps like Facebook and Instagram as well as poking through e-mail. Answering and ending calls was also easy enough with one free hand but actually dialing numbers was not.
Other tasks, like unlocking the home screen, managing the camera app to take pictures, and typing even using SwiftKey were simply troublesome and required most fingers from both hands.
Performance is decent, thanks to a 1.5GHz quad core processor, 2GB of RAM and Huawei's surprisingly sleek Emotion UI interface which moves things along quite briskly.
The larger screen and more pixels does require more horsepower and the Huawei Ascend Mate will feel a touch laggy compared to say an HTC One or a Moto X. It felt slightly snappier than the Samsung Galaxy Mega, though which is really the product that Huawei seems to be targeting.
If SPen or stylus input is important to you, it's difficult to endorse the Huawei Ascend Mate since this is purely a multi-touch enabled device that doesn't have the capacity of a digitizer. The SPen feature in Samsung's Galaxy Note device didn't really appeal to me as I found their application limited so it wasn't something I missed.
I did miss the IR blaster capability and option to turn the Ascent Mate into a universal remote control, something that Samsung and other manufacturers are baking right into their devices and which doesn't add a lot of overhead in terms of production costs but that consumers appreciate.
The Huawei Ascend Mate's capacious screen, its great build quality and relatively smooth user interface, as well as large battery life, are the features that make it feel like it is punching above its weight class. In many ways, the Ascend Mate is the perfect device to introduce Huawei to potential users and it plants a seed of excitement and anticipation for what's to come from this upstart manufacturer.
Rating: 4 out of 5
CONTEST: Stay Tuned as we're giving away an unlocked Huawei Ascend Mate smartphone very soon!
Reader Comments (1)
The Huawei smartphone is soo cool and thanks for sharing about there reviews.