Huawei Ascend Y100

Huawei Ascend Y100

 

Along time Anonymous brand, Huawei is now busy in getting it’s name in the Mobile phone manufactures. Recently Huawei has released it’s new phone Known as Ascend y100. Now this phone is up in market and having a great business out there, and soon we will watch that Huawei is Going to have it’s name up in the Smartphone’s manufactures. Soon we’ll see it’s “Hero” device.

 

 

The quad-core Huawei Ascend D Quad, but before the main event there’s a budget Android taster in the shape of the Huawei Ascend Y100, which comes with a capacitive touch screen, 3.2-megapixel camera plus 3G and Wi-Fi for under a ton. 

 

One-time anonymous white label manufacturer for label brands,Huawei has been getting busy with handsets in its own name of late. Very soon we’ll get to see its “hero” device, the quad-core Huawei Ascend D Quad. But before the main event there’s a budget Android taster in the shape of the Huawei Ascend Y100, which comes with a capacitive touch screen, 3.2-megapixel camera plus 3G and Wi-Fi for under a ton.

 

Design

Launched exclusively with O2, it’s quite sleek looking, in tactile rubberised plastic with chrome-look trim (and a free customised back cover if you buy the phone before the end of August). Beneath the screen is a touch-sensitive strip with back, menu and search buttons, while what looks like a D-pad beneath them is actually an outsize Android home button.

The screen is just 2.8-inches with a resolution of 320×240 pixels, so fairly standard at this low end of the market. It’s capacitive though, which means it’s a bit more responsive than the resistive variety, which still haunts the lower depths of the smartphone set.

 

Features and performance

It runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread, which is still par for the course on budget phones, while their high-end brethren race off to the green fields of Ice Cream Sandwich. This is far from a disaster, since the whizzy elements of the latest Android OS would put unnecessary strain on the 800MHz processor.

Those 800MHz put in a reasonable performance, with occasional lag, but nothing to get too worked up about. The phone delivered an AnTuTu performance benchmark rating of 2,675, putting it slightly ahead of the HTC One V, which will cost you twice as much, and well ahead of the budget Orange San Francisco II. In short: it’s quite nippy for its class.

It has 3G but not of the high-speed HSPDA variety, and it has to be said that browsing couldn’t really be described as fast, even when you’re connected via Wi-Fi.

With such a small screen, typing space is pretty tight, but there’s the option of three different keyboard layouts — standard, numerical keypad style and a third version that uses two letters per key, qw, er etc.

 

Camera and extra features

The 3.2-megapixel camera has no autofocus and no flash. Picture quality isn’t great either, with washed out colours and a lot of noise creeping in with less than ideal light conditions. It’s light on detail too.

GPS is on board though, which gives you photo geo-tagging, and along with GPS comes Google Maps Navigation. The video camera drops the resolution to VGA quality but it does record at 30fps, which is smoother than you’d expect at this level. There’s no front-facing camera for video calls though.

There’s a trial version of Documents To Go, which allows you to view Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, but to edit them or create your own, you’ll need to pay for the full version.

There’s 512MB memory on board and you can back that up with a further 32GB via microSD card.

The battery’s small, but held up very well, no doubt helped by the middling screen and low-power processor — we got a good couple of days of regular use out of it.

 

Conclusion

For the price, the Huawei offers a decent set of specs for a budget Android device. The screen’s a little too small to be comfortable, the camera’s not too exciting, but the processor puts in a decent performance, making it a good low-price introduction to the smartphone world.

Specifications

• Software : Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread

• Processor : 800MHz Qualcomm MSM7225A

• Memory slot : microSD

• Display : 2.8in capacitive touch screen, 320×240 pixels

• Connectivity : Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth v2.1

• Ports : Micro USB, 3.5mm headphone jack

• Camera : 3.2 megapixel with fixed focus, 2.8x digital zoom,geo-tagging

• Video playback : MPEG4

• Audio playback : MP3, AAC, AMR-NB, MIDI, OGG, WAV

• Radio : Yes

• Battery : Li-ion

• Size : 106x56x11mm

• Weight : 100g