Huawei Ascend

The Huawei Ascend is a terrific bargain on Cricket’s lineup. It’s a full-fledged Android smartphone, available without a contract, for about the same price you’d pay for a carrier-subsidized smartphone on one of the big four networks. Sure, it can’t match a Droid in specs, but is it still a smart buy?

The Huawei Ascend on Cricket reaches an odd mix of cheap and classy. Most of the phone is swathed in glossy, piano black plastic, with brushed metal accents up front and a sanded steel band around the sides. It’s like an old school magician in a tuxedo. From a short distance, the phone looks slick and polished, assuming you’ve wiped your fingerprints off that glossy shell. Hold it in your hand, however, and the illusion starts to fade. The plastic feels a bit cheap. The buttons up front, all hidden beneath a continuous strip of brushed metal, are a bit too hard to press, and have a sharp click to them. 

The phone is fairly thick, and the back bulges a bit, making it feel even bigger. It’s still quite comfortable in the hand, but this isn’t a svelte Samsung Galaxy S phone. Still, it was easy to slip into the pocket of a pair of comfortable pants, and it’s not a heavy phone, so the weight didn’t drag me down. 

Up front, the Huawei Ascend uses a unique button layout, among Android devices. The phone has real Send and End keys, a luxury on today’s touchscreen phones. That End key can be programmed to act as a Home key as well, when you’re not in a call, or it can put the phone to sleep. There is also a Menu key and a Back key on both sides of the Ascend’s trackball. The phone lacks the familiar Search key you’ll find on most Android phones, but I didn’t mind the trade-off. 

On the left side of the phone you’ll find the power / screen lock button. It raises to a small hump, but it’s still not as easy to find as the volume rocker or the camera button, which are both on the right side of the phone. There is also a microSD card slot on the left, covered with a flimsy port cover. I’d give that cover a month before it breaks off (or I tear it off, either way). 

Up top, there’s another port cover, also flimsy, covering the microUSB port and the headphone port. That’s a 2.5mm headphone port, so your standard issue earbuds will not work with this device. That’s a real pain if you wanted to listen to music on this phone.

Screen 

The Huawei Ascend uses a 3.5-inch display running 480 x 320 pixels. Considering the low resolution for a screen this size, I think the Ascend’s display did a fine job handling the Android interface. Icons looked blocky and text could be jagged, sure, but the screen is plenty bright and colorful. There is no automatic brightness, but I didn’t need to crank the screen up to its brightest level, at least not indoors. Outside, it was very difficult to read the Ascend’s screen, and nearly impossible to take pictures with the viewfinder. Still, it isn’t the worst display I’ve seen on an Android phone by far, and that’s enough faint praise for this inexpensive device. 

Sound 

Call quality on the Huawei Ascend was pretty good. I didn’t hear any significant audio problems during my test calls, and my callers heard me loud and clear. The earpiece volume could be a bit louder, but it was fine to use in a crowded shop or while driving down the highway. The speaker was loud, but not as abusively loud as I prefer. The speakerphone could not come close to the volume of the ringtones, however, and calls made over the speaker were difficult to hear with any background noise. 

Signal 

Though Cricket only sells phones in certain areas, the carrier does have roaming agreements that guarantee a 3G network signal from coast to coast. Here in North Texas, Cricket won’t sell me a new phone, but I had no problem connecting calls or using the data network. All of my calls went through just fine. Data was sluggish, but it was consistent. It crawled along happily without stopping. 

Battery 

Battery life on the Huawei Ascend was not bad. The phone easily lasted through a full day of testing with Wi-Fi enabled the whole time. I did not use GPS much for navigation, but I did use the camera often and the screen was always set to a high brightness. You’ll definitely need to charge the Ascend every night, but you could probably leave your charger at home and make it through a work day with no trouble.

Touch sensitivity was a problem on the Huawei Ascend, though again it isn’t the worst Android phone I’ve touched. Swiping motions actually worked fine, so it was easy to navigate the phone’s homescreen panels and interface. But fine-tuned tapping was very difficult. This caused significant problems on the keyboard. Huawei wisely chose Swype to handle keyboard duties. When I swiped my finger from letter to letter to spell a word, the phone had no trouble. But when I had to type a word that was not in Swype’s dictionary, the phone often missed letters or caused typos, due to poor touch sensitivity. Strangely, a few times I could swear I saw one letter light up under my tap, but then an adjacent letter would appear on screen. This probably means the phone registered the tap as I was lifting my finger, which is an annoying problem to deal with. 

The Huawei Ascend also lacks multi-touch capabilities. Multi-touch isn’t a necessity on Android, but it makes a lot of apps better. To zoom in the Web browser or the image gallery, you have to use the onscreen zoom buttons, instead of being able to pinch the screen.