Huawei Ascend Mate 6.1-inch Android brute hits UK for £335

It might be the kind of mate who crushes your grip in his iron handshake and calls you a girl if you can't drink 10 pints of Carling, but the mammoth Huawei Ascend Mate is coming to the UK soon, so you'd better grin and bear it.

The 6.1-inch Android behemoth has pitched up for pre-order on phone retailer Expansys for £335 -- something of a bargain if a gigantic screen is what you're looking for in a phone. It's certainly much cheaper than the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, or even its cut-price cousin the Galaxy Mega, which is out in July for £460.

Its specs are pretty respectable too, with a quad-core 1.5GHz processor and 2GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel camera and Android 4.1. The vast screen offers 1,280x720 pixels for a density of 240 pixels per inch, which is hardly retina-fooling, but perfectly decent.

By contrast, the Galaxy Mega has a 1.7GHz dual-core processor, 4G and the more up-to-date Android 4.2.

Another competitor in the hand-stretching stakes is the even bigger Asus Fonepad, a ludicrous 7-inch beast that's so huge it makes you feel extremely foolish when you use it as a phone. It's also much less powerful, with just a single-core 1.2GHz chip. It is significantly cheaper, however, at just £180.

We went hands-on with the Mate at CES, where we found its mighty dimensions "overwhelming". We'll look forward to putting it to the test in our full review -- if it fits through the letterbox, that is.

Would you be tempted by the massive Mate? Or is just too humungous? Make friends down in the comments, or over on our matey Facebook page.