Huawei Ascend Mate2 4G review: Value king

13MP still camera

Huawei Ascend Mate2 4G features a 13MP Sony-made camera sensor, capable of capturing still photos with a resolution of 4208 x 3120 pixels. A single-LED flash helps the snapper in low-light situations.

The camera interface looks pretty standard - you get a still/video camera toggle, a virtual shutter and a shortcut to the gallery on the right. The fun stuff is on the left side - you get multiple shooting modes (we'll cover those in a second), color effects, face effects and general settings.

The camera interface

The Huawei Ascend Mate2 produces some really good quality camera samples. We even suspect the camera sensor is the same as the one used by the Oppo Find 7/7a and the LG G3 as the level of resolved detail is quite similar. The colors are a bit oversaturated, but they nevertheless look pleasant. Beyond that, the details at 1:1 magnification have a quite natural look even though that leaves noticeable amounts of noise (which we don't mind).

Huawei Ascend Mate2 camera samples

Low light samples: Flash Off • Flash On

HDR mode samples: On • Off

Video camera

The video camera interface is unsurprisingly similar to that of the still camera. The recording button is on the right, while the settings are located on the left.

The camcorder interface

The 1080p videos captured by the Ascend Mate2 have a constant framerate of 30fps. The video stream is encoded with a bitrate of 20Mbps, while the stereo audio stream has a bitrate of 156Kbps.

Unfortunately, the 1080p videos shot by the Huawei Ascend Mate2 are nowhere near the high quality of the still images produced by the camera. On the positive side, the colors are nicely oversaturated as the still photos, the framerate is smooth and the contrast is fine, but overall, the videos look somewhat soft.

You can check out a sample from the device on YouTube below.

Also if you want to check out what the uncompressed videos look like, you can download this 1080p@30fps sample (10s, 26MB).