Huawei Ascend Mate review: Gentle giant

Connectivity misses LTE and NFC

The Huawei Ascend mate comes with quad-band 2G/GPRS/EDGE and penta-band 3G, meaning you'll be able to use it pretty much anywhere in the world. 3G comes with HSDPA and HSUPA - for up to 42Mbps downlink and 5.7Mbps uplink. There is no LTE support though.

Local connectivity is covered by dual-band Wi-Fi a/b/g/n with DLNA, so you can easily play media (photos, videos, music) from DLNA-enabled storage devices or push content from your phone to a DLNA TV or music player.

The DLNA app handles the wireless multimedia duties • Sharing files over DLNA

Bluetooth 4.0 is also available but there's no NFC.

The microUSB port on the Huawei Ascend mate also supports USB host so you can attach USB flash drives or connect mice/keyboards.

Excellent web browser experience

The Ascend Mate comes with two excellent web browsers - the stock Jelly Bean edition and Google Chrome. The stock browser UI is quite minimalistic - you get the URL bar with a tabs and a settings shortcuts, and that's it. Hitting the Settings key reveals the rest of the controls - everything from searching on the page, saving to bookmarks to useful options like bypassing mobile sites, saving a page for offline reading and sharing a page.

The Stock Web broser

The full settings menu includes some really interesting options. For example, you can set your search provider to be Yahoo or Bing, you can adjust text size and the level of which double tap will zoom in.

Tab switching is handled in a similar way to switching between apps. You can even close tabs by swiping them off the screen.

Switching tabs works the same way as switching apps does

The browser has Incognito mode (there's no global setting, but you can open Incognito tabs). The other thing the browser does is preload search results when it's confident you'll click on them. These are two tricks borrowed from Google's desktop browser.

Quick controls are available from the Labs settings, which reveal three controls (Tabs, URL, More) when you tap anywhere on the edge of the screen.

The Quick controls

We still prefer the Chrome browser because of its cross-platform sync capabilities. It's absolutely identical in terms of interface, features (sans the Quick Controls), and behavior. Sometimes it's even faster.

Google Chrome