Huawei has launched its own take on a product that Samsung carved out with the Galaxy Note – the ‘phablet’. However, its new Ascend Mate takes things much further than Samsung’s two Note smartphones.
Launched at CES 2013, the new Huawei Ascend Mate is a gigantic 6.1-inch smartphone that could very well pass off as a small tablet. The large display is an IPS panel and so is naturally bright, vivid and great to view at all sorts of angles. It’s also classed as a HD display, so quality looks to be decent. Huawei boasts the highest screen to body ratio, with bezels and edging kept to a minimum.
Inside the phone there’s a quad-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz running Android Jelly Bean 4.1. Like most manufacturers, Huawei has added its own touch by skinning Android with something it calls Emotion UI, which mimics some features found on the Galaxy Note. For example, there’s an option to make the device suitable for one handed use – sliding over the keyboard to one particular side of the display to make things easier to reach with one finger or thumb.
A device of this size is obviously going to need a battery to match, and that’s where the whopping 4,050 mAh battery cell comes in, which Huawei says should provide enough juice to get you through a full day. It also has battery saving technology which Huawei says will help you get up to two days of regular use from a single charge, and furthermore it will charge up 30% faster than most smartphones.
Finally, there’s an 8-megapixel camera on the back and a 1-megapixel camera up front for video calling and such. The handset is fairly slim at 6.5mm thin, and when it launches there will be black and white versions available. Huawei will launch the handset firstly in China next month, then in March it will go worldwide.