Huawei made a big impact at CES with the excellent Ascend Mate 2 4G, an enormous phone which we liked enough to give it one of our coveted best in show awards. It also made us look forward to seeing what it would bring to MWC, but just prior to the show’s opening, we found out the anticipated Ascend P7 wouldn’t be making its official debut in Barcelona. Instead, we’ve got a mid-range device named the Ascend G6, which is an Ascend P6 Mini in all but name.
Taking its styling almost directly from the Ascend P6, it has a 4.5-inch screen with a 960 x 540 pixel resolution, a quad-core Snapdragon processor running at 1.2GHz, and an 8-megapixel rear camera. The 5-megapixel camera above the screen will make for great selfies, but the Android 4.2 Jelly Bean OS is a little behind the times.
It comes in two versions, one with 4G LTE and the other without, plus a wide range of colors and unusual two-tone options. It’s light at 140 grams, and slim at 7.5mm thick. However, when compared to the LG G2 Mini, which has a very similar specification, it feels larger despite the G2 having a bigger 4.7-inch screen. It proves what a difference those rear-mounted buttons make to the overall size of LG’s latest smartphone.
Huawei has installed its Emotion UI over the top of Android. It comes with several different themes and other options to customize the look, which you can see demonstrated in our hands-on video. The Ascend G6’s hardware is very pretty, and it has a surprisingly up-market feel for what is likely to be a sensibly priced smartphone. Sadly, like most other Huawei phones, we don’t expect it to launch in the U.S. anytime soon, but it’s another example of how Huawei has consistently improved its build quality, design, and functionality over the past months.
