Huawei Blaze review comparision full specifications with video

Huawei Blaze review comparision full specifications with video

Hua-wha? If you think Huawei is some fly-by-night Shanzhai operation, guess again: it’s one of the world’s biggest players in telecoms and mobile phone manufacturing. It just so happens that the Huawei Blaze is the first blower it’s sold under its own name. Is it any good though? Let’s take a gander, shall we?

Verdict
For the price, there’s very little to match this gem of a smartphone

Love 
Android 2.3, attractive design, sub-£100 price tag

Hate 
Rubbish default keyboard, mediocre battery life

Specs: 
Screen: 3.2-inch, 480 x 320 resolution
Connectivity: HSDPA, Wi-Fi, GPS, USB
Camera: 3.2-megapixel
Storage: 512MB expandable to 32GB via microSD
Battery: 1200mAh
Size/Weight: 110 x 56.5 x 11.2 mm, 104 grams

You probably do know Huawei: it’s been white labelling affordable smartphones for years for the networks (see the Vodafone Smart 858). Jealous of the HTC cat eating all the cream though, it’s striking out on its own to carve a space out for its own brand, starting with the Huawei Blaze.

To its credit, the Blaze marks the first time one of Huawei’s small handsets has been sleek and attractive, rather than simply stumpy. An 11mm thin profile is quite the feat for a dirt-cheap smartphone, and while gripping the phone immediately gives the game away, the plastic silver band and home button below the screen give the impression of a more premium metal finish.

All the ports are where you’d expect (micro USB on the bottom, 3.5mm audio on the top and volume rocker on the side) while the three capacitive back, menu and search buttons below the screen are perfectly responsive, even if they don’t light up. The rubberised back has a pleasant feel to it, as well as that “with Google” logo to add some extra class to the proceedings.

All in all, the Huawei Blaze has a build low price competitors can’t quite match – a good start.

Screen & key features
Again, the Huawei Blaze surprises for its price tag with a capacitive touchscreen that’s responsive to fingertip prods and pinch-to-zoom gestures, rather than a cruddy resistive screen requiring a stylus, or growing your fingernails. The LCD-TFT 3.2-inch panel is bright with decent viewing angles, and although the resolution is relatively low (480 x 320 rather than 960 x 540 like some flagship Android phones), squashed into the small panel it makes for very legible text.

All apps, if not games, support this resolution (HVGA) too. Just bear in mind that the size may not be greeted by your thumbs with joy if you have great big man paws – Huawei openly admits it’s aiming at teens with this device.

The key feature of the Huawei Blaze is unquestionably the price. It can be had for under £100 without contract, and when you consider that it’s not just a phone, but an Android mobile computer, that makes it an absolute steal. It’s a sub-£100 gizmo that can act as a remote control, a music streamer, a sat nav, a video player, a games console – the list really does go on. And better yet, most of its similarly powered rivals cost almost twice as much.

Usability & connectivity
Affordable Android phones can sometimes prove a false economy: slow software and tiny unresponsive screens can be a recipe for smashing them on the floor in frustration.

So long as your fingers can cope with the small screen size, however, the Huawei Blaze is eminently usable. The customised skin on top of Android 2.3.4 is fast, bright, cheery and easy to get your head around, with an HTC-style weather widget front and centre, kaleidoscopic icons and snazzy screen transition animations. There are also connection toggles in the pull down notification menu – a helpful touch. Considering it’s all running on a 600MHz CPU and a pathetic 256MB of RAM, it’s really rather impressive.

There is one large caveat though – the default TouchPal keyboard is absolutely maddening to use on a small screen, not least because it disregards volume control and your settings to make noisy clicking sounds as you type, whatever you do. We get why Huawei went with it (it’s the best option for Chinese language input on Android, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s a Chinese company), but do yourself a favour and grab another keyboard – such as SwiftKey or Keyboard From Android 2.3 – off the Android Market ASAP.

An Android smartphone wouldn’t be an Android smartphone without 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS to get you online and find you on a map with a tap (No seriously, it wouldn’t – Google wouldn’t let you use its coveted suite of apps if you tried), and naturally the Huawei Blaze sports all three.

All Android devices running 2.2 “Froyo” and up – including this one – also come with the ability to act as a mobile hotspot, using Wi-Fi to share their 3G connection to laptops, tablets and iPod touches galore. There is no DLNA media streaming app included, but you can download one of several from the Android Market.

Camera & media
The secret to making a phone that costs so little is, sadly, to phone in (sorry) the camera. Unsurprisingly, the Huawei Blaze’s 3.2-megapixel camera is closer to dire than legendary, with flat, noisy results. And the flash? Forget about it, there isn’t one. It’s quite fast at processing snaps however, and will do in a pinch if you need to take a snap of the shopping list.

There is also a front facing camera for video chat, however. It’s a nice addition for a low-end smartphone, especially now that Google Talk for Android supports webcam hobnobbing.

As a barebones Android phone, the Huawei Blaze shuns extra codec support, so if you want to play anything other than MP3s and standard definition MP4 clips, you’ll need to find a third-party app on the Android Market. The low-power chipset also means that Adobe Flash support is a no-go.

The good news is that the Huawei Blaze is perfectly adept at playing back other mobile-friendly online video without stutter – might we suggest checking out m.tvcatchup.com to watch telly live?

Apps, call quality and battery life
Huawei has included just a small handful of custom apps, and they’re good’uns, especially if you’re new to this whole smartphone lark. Smart Traffic works like 3G Watchdog, warning you if you’re getting near your data limit, while All BackUp lets you back up applications and data to your SD card.

Lastly there’s Streams, which pulls in your mates’ Facebook, Twitter and Flickr rambling in one place (There’s also a home screen widget), and we have no qualms with this. While integration isn’t as tight as it is on HTC Sense Android phones, reminding you when it’s someone’s birthday when they ring, it isn’t laggy, and it is easy to use. Come on people, you’re paying next to nothing here.

We couldn’t ask for any more when it came to call quality and speaker performance: we had no problems on this front whatsoever. The one catch is that battery life isn’t amazing – Huawei could only squeeze a 1200mAh battery inside the dinky chassis. It’ll last you a day with all connections blazing, but this may still come as a shock to Nokia feature phone owners and BlackBerry Curve converts. But hey, look at this way: this is the only real compromise in an otherwise jewel of a smartphone.

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