A skinny glass Android phone for lovers of selfies
Huawei's latest flagship phone, the Ascend P7, crams some decent kit into a seriously slim, glass-backed body.
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Huawei has a new flagship phone, set to do battle in the brutal smartphone arena against the Samsung Galaxy S5, HTC One M8 and Sony Xperia Z2. It's called the Ascend P7 and, if the name didn't give you a clue, it's the successor to last year's Ascend P6.
Like the P6, the P7 is extremely skinny and it comes with a set of features that no flagship phone should be without -- Android 4.4 KitKat, a quad-core processor and a Full HD display. You'll also find an 8-megapixel camera on the front, which is a seriously healthy serving of pixels for a front-facing camera. The Ascend P7 may be the ideal phone for selfie-lovers.
While Huawei has said it'll be going on sale throughout Europe and Asia in June (with no word on US or Australian availability yet), it hasn't answered the all-important question of how much it'll cost. I recently went hands-on at a press event -- here's what I thought.
Design and display
The Ascend P7 follows many of the design cues of its predecessor. It's still ludicrously skinny at only 6.5mm thick, it has a metal band running around the edge, and the bottom of the phone curves around from the front to the back -- something I'm still ambivalent about. It has had a few tweaks since last year, however.
The metal back panel has gone, replaced with a glass one. It gives it quite an elegant feel and it has a dotted effect that I found attractive on both the black and white models I had a look at. The glass is the latest toughened Gorilla Glass 3, which is designed to be extremely hard-wearing against scratches and breaks -- we'll see how it fares against a pocketful of my scratchiest keys in the full CNET review.
Although its sizeable 5-inch display is a smidge bigger than the P6's 4.7 inches, its narrow bezel means the actual body of the phone hasn't ballooned out too much. It measures a little under 69mm wide, making it reasonably comfortable to use in one hand and its 124g weight isn't likely to drag your jeans down around your ankles.
Tucked into the metal edges are the micro-SIM card and microSD card slot, both accessible using a SIM-tray removal tool. You can expand the 16GB of internal storage with microSD cards up to 64GB in size. The 3.5mm headphone jack, which used to be awkwardly placed on the side of the phone, has now been moved to the top -- much more sensible.
The 5-inch display has a Full HD (1,920x1,080-pixel) resolution, and seems every bit as crisp, bright and bold as you'd expect a flagship phone to be. I'll have to leave the final verdict on how it compares to the Galaxy S5, HTC One M8 and Sony Xperia Z2 for the full review.
Processor and software
The P7 runs on a Kirin 910T quad-core processor clocked at 1.8GHz. How it compares to the faster Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chips you'd find inside top Android devices such as the S5 and Z2 remains to be seen. Its fair clock speed and 2GB of RAM should help it tackle most tasks with aplomb though.
Android 4.4 KitKat -- the latest version of Google's mobile operating system -- is on board as standard, but you probably won't notice, given how heavily Huawei has skinned it. Huawei has loaded its Emotion UI on to the phone, which makes a bunch of key changes to standard Android. On the downside, it ditches the app tray, forcing you to keep all your app icons scattered among your widgets across numerous home screens. I found this to quickly become cluttered and awkward to use on other Huawei phones.
On the upside, however, you can download a wide selection of themes to customise the home screens, menus and even the app icons, and there's a simplified view that makes it easy for even the most technophobic to use.
The phone comes with a reasonably capacious 2,500mAh battery, which I'd imagine will at least get you through the day with moderate use. If you're running low on juice, the P7 has a power-saving mode that turns the display monochrome and restricts 4G data and other battery-heavy processes. If that sounds at all familiar, it's because Samsung has what sounds like the exact same feature on its Galaxy S5. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery though, right guys?
Camera
The back of the phone is home to a 13-megapixel camera and an LED flash. As well as the usual scene modes, HDR modes and live filters, Huawei has included a "new" feature that pairs 10 seconds of audio with a still image. Just to clarify, I mean it was new when Samsung included the exact same feature, named Sound Shot, on the Galaxy S4 last year.
Perhaps more impressive is the 8-megapixel camera on the front. That's a huge resolution for a front-facing camera and it far outstrips most of its rivals, on paper at least. Huawei is evidently keen for the P7 to land in the pockets of selfie-lovers everywhere. To help, it's whacked in some software that softens skin and eradicates nasty blemishes -- although overused, it can make you look, let's say, a little unusual.
I'll be putting both cameras to the test in the full CNET review.
Outlook
While the Huawei Ascend P7 has a decent lineup of specs and a super-slim body, it doesn't seem to offer a huge amount to distinguish itself from its competitors. With a slower processor than its Qualcomm-packing rivals and of course without the brand appeal of Samsung, Sony or Apple, Huawei will need to stick a very reasonable price tag on the P7 if it hopes to seriously compete.