Why You Can Trust CNET Huawei M750 (MetroPCS) review: Huawei M750 (MetroPCS)
Huawei M750 (MetroPCS)
Huawei M750 (MetroPCS)
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Huawei is a little-known cell phone manufacturer in the United States, mostly because a majority of its phones here have been basic handsets like the Huawei M328. Still, the company has gained momentum slowly in the past year: Huawei built the T-Mobile Tap last year and now it offers the M750. As one of two touch-screen handsets available from MetroPCS (the other is the Samsung Finesse), it's not the most advanced phone we've ever seen, but the M750 still has a number of features for the average user. The Huawei M750 is available for $159 without a contract.
Design
The M750 measures 4.2 inches long by 2.25 inches wide by 0.59 inch thick; it's a simple rectangular slab similar to other touch-screen phones. It has rounded corners, an all-gray color palette, a glossy front surface, and a matte finish on the back. At 3.91 ounces, the M750 feels solid in the hand.
Dominating the front of the phone is a 2.8-inch touch-screen, which may seem a little small when you compare it with the 3-inch display on the Finesse. However, the M750 doesn't have a video player and you can't rotate the display to landscape mode, so we're fine with the smaller screen. The screen is sharp and colorful thanks to the 262,000-color support and 240x320-pixel resolution. You can adjust the backlight time, the brightness, the appearance of the clock on the home screen, and the greeting banner text. Though you can't change the menu interface, we liked the simple grid layout and the illuminated icons.
The touch screen on the M750 is responsive and intuitive to use. Still, we found it to be more accurate when we used the phone's stylus instead of our fingers. You can improve the accuracy by going through the phone's calibration wizard. Along the bottom row of the home screen are shortcuts to the phone dialer, the Web browser, the MetroPCS Web store, and the screen lock function. The phone dialer has a roomy keypad with big digits. It also has a backspace key and quick access to the contacts list and call log.
For text messages, you can either type via an alphanumeric T9-capable keypad or a full QWERTY keyboard. The M750 does not have an internal accelerometer, so the screen does not rotate to landscape mode. As a result, the keyboard feels quite crowded and the keys are tiny. We definitely felt like we needed to use the stylus here to select the keys accurately.
Beneath the display is a navigation array, which you can use in addition to the touch interface. It consists of two soft keys, a square toggle with a middle confirmation key, a Send key, and an End/Power key. The toggle also acts as shortcuts to the Contacts list, the MetroPCS Store, the Messaging menu, and the Web browser. To get to the main menu from standby, you can select the middle key or tap once on the home screen. The keys are flat to the surface with the exception of the square toggle. We didn't find that too annoying; we found ourselves using the touch screen for the most part anyway.
On the left spine are the microSD card slot, the charger jack, and a 2.5mm headset port; the volume rocker and a dedicated camera key are on the right. On the back, there's a stylus storage area on the upper left corner. The camera lens and external speaker are on the back as well.
Features
The Huawei M750 has a 1,000-entry phone book with room in each entry for four numbers, an e-mail address, a Web address, and notes. You can then add the contacts to caller groups, pair them with a photo for caller ID, and pair them with one of 10 polyphonic ringtones. You can also use your own voice recordings or MP3 files as ringtones. Other basic features include a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, a scheduler, an alarm clock, a world clock, a calculator, a stopwatch, and a memo pad.
More-advanced features include Bluetooth, voice dialing, a voice recorder, and A-GPS. The phone also supports e-mail and instant messaging, but you need to download those applications from the MetroPCS store. Even though the M750 is a touch-screen device, its browser is just simple Access Netfont WAP 2.0 instead of full HTML. This was a little disappointing, but since the M750 lacks an accelerometer, the M750 probably isn't the best platform for a HTML browser anyway.
The M750 has a simple music player interface. Settings include shuffle and repeat modes, four equalizer presets, and the capability to create and edit playlists. You need to have a microSD card to use the music player. The M750 has an internal memory of 77MB, and supports up to 4GB cards.
The 1.3-megapixel camera on the M750 produces surprisingly good photo quality. Images looked sharp and the colors are bright without looking washed out. You can take pictures in four resolutions and three quality settings. Other settings include a night mode, a self-timer, multishot mode, four color effects, four fun frames, and the choice of two shutter sounds plus a silent option. There is no built-in video recorder.
You can personalize the M750 with a variety of wallpaper and ringtones, plus you can download more from the MetroPCS store.
Performance
We tested the Huawei M750 in San Francisco using MetroPCS' network. Call quality was decent, but it could be better. On our end, we heard our callers very clearly and experienced little static. Their voices sounded natural as well. On their end, they could hear us loud and clear. They did detect quite a bit of background noise at times, however, and there was a bit of crackling. Speakerphone calls were mediocre at best. Though we could hear callers fine, they said we sounded muffled and distant, even though we spoke relatively close to the mic. Music quality via the speakers sounded tinny and hollow, and we would recommend using a stereo headset for the best performance.
The M750 supports only 2.5 1xRTT networks, but since it has only a WAP browser, we thought that was fine. Simple WAP pages loaded in around 30 seconds.
The M750 has a rated battery life of 6 hours talk time and 11.25 days standby time. It has a tested talk time of 6.72 hours. According to the FCC, the M750 has a digital SAR rating of 1.14 watts per kilogram.