Huawei Ascend P6 Review

The ultra-slim Huawei Ascend P6 has taken the title of the slimmest smartphone from all the major players of the smartphone arena. With this action the new entrant in the area has boldly stated that it is coming up to speed with its competitors who are some of the big guns in the smartphone industry, and even trying to push into leadership slot in some areas. The Ascend P6, with its classy and well-designed body, contains a balanced feature set that is appealing to all, demonstrated by the increase in sales.

The Ascend P6, the 6.2 mm thin device, is powered by the company's self-developed chipset - the K3V2 - featuring a quad-core 1.5GHz Cortex-A9 processor, a 16-core GPU and a very well utilized 2GB of RAM. The strategy taken up by Huawei in its latest devices to use its own manufactured processors shows the increasing confidence that the company has in its own products, as well as providing the company with the free hand to utilize the chipset to its maximum for an enhanced performance.

While unboxing the Huawei Ascend P6, you will get everything inside the retail box that you need to get started with this phone.

• Huawei Ascend P6 handset
• An A/C adapter (will use the USB cable for charging)
• MicroUSB cable connector for A/C adapter for charging
• Earphones
• Semi-transparent rubber case
• Headset jack cover (with eject tool)

The Huawei Ascend P6 has a 4.7" IPS+ display, with a pixel density of 312ppi, competitive to the Apple iPhone 5. An addition is the width of angles of view, which does not impact colors and there is a minimal contrast loss. The colors are just perfect, the contrast is flawless and overall, the display was pleasantly surprising to us.

An additional Smart Backlight toggle is present in the Display settings, to maintain the screen brightness level in consistent increase or decrease rather than spiking the display brightness levels due to drastic changes in brightness settings.

The Ascend P6 also has a new option, allowing users to adjust the color temperature of the screen. Using this option the screen can be provided a cooler or warmer tone, which in colors interprets to be a blue or amber tint. Also, the Magic Touch tech makes the screen highly sensitive, even accepting touch with gloves on, something that is ideal in the cold.

The size and width of the device is a major attraction for the device, and coupled with the metallic finish of the device back, the curves provided at the bottom and the way the frame has been designed. The device is button less, and the sides of aluminum, though pretty similar to the 4/4S devices, goes well with the device design. Also, the single piece body, though taking out the removable battery concept, may have played a part in the slim profile. The device easily fits into the hand, and also pockets, something that is rare in large devices these days.

The Ascend P6 is not a small device, as it has a 4.7” display, but the excellent design, enhanced with the curves and the sides, makes the device look and feel like royalty. The whole front is covered by Gorilla Glass, while the back has a brushed metallic texture which has a grip to it, and side frame of aluminum – seemingly a highly successful blend.

The Ascend P6 has Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, enhanced with the Emotion UI v1.6. This makes for a hassle-free interface. Huawei has done well to improve Android’s user friendliness rather than renovating Android.

On the device front, since the buttons have been removed, the complete front is touch, with status LED and sensors left of the earpiece, and the front camera on the right of it. The microUSB slot and secondary mike (which also aids in active noise cancellation in calls) are present at the top, while the primary microphone is present at the bottom. Across at the back, the camera lens for the 8MP shooter is present at the top left, with the flash next to it, while the loudspeaker slot is at the bottom left side.

The 5 MP front facer is actually pretty neat. It does some great shots specially portrait which can also be improved by the Beauty Face option available, and can go up to 720p for videos at 30fps.

On the right side, the Power/Lock key, the volume rocker, and card slots for microSD as well as microSIM are present. These little trays require an eject pin to open up, and the eject pin is inserted into the audio jack on the left side of device for easy access. This is a bit unusual, but the concept of keeping the pin safe plus saving the port from dust somehow makes sense. However, the pin needs to be kept safely otherwise there is a definite risk of misplacement.

The Ascend P6 arrives with a cool rubber casing that covers the entire back and sides snugly. The case is semi-transparent so the looks of the device aren't lost, with the added safety, though ultimately the thickness does increase somewhat. The 2000 mAh Li-Ion battery of Ascend P6 received a pretty decent 46-hour rating in our battery testing during a daily run. The energy-efficient chipset does gain points for this much above average rating.

The Overview mode to enable organization of the home screens can be accessed by a pinch on the home screen. If the FM radio or Music Player is running in background, the notification area will be displaying the controls for the media player also. The Profiles setup is present with predefined profiles, but can be customized as well as new ones can be created. For each profile, screen timeout, volume, brightness, vibration for different notifications, and settings related to connectivity can be managed.

The Power Manager contains three non-customizable modes - Smart, Normal and Endurance performance. Configuration can be done independently against which apps are to run at boot, as well as which apps can run in the background and which cannot. Huawei has tweaked the Android's default task manager to carry a close key (in addition to the default swipe to close gesture). There is also a "Kill all" option at the bottom that can close all running apps.

The Ascend P6 has Polaris Office 4.0 inbuilt, which makes document editing easy. Word, Excel and PowerPoint files (both the 2003 and 2007 versions) are supported, and PDF files can be opened additionally it works as a file explorer too. Some of the options provided include adjusting font size, formatting, text justification, lists, and more. An actual file explorer is also present in Ascend P6, with two tabs that can manage the internal and external storage.

The 8MP camera that Ascend P6 has can capture maximum resolution images of 3264 x 2448 pixels this is also aided with a flash. The camera interface disappointed us a bit, as it had things hidden for much tapping to be done to access the options and features. The Volume Up key works as the camera shutter as well, and holding the button longer focuses the camera and the image is snapped on release of the button. Though, we have to give it to the Ascend P6 that the camera has an excellent level of very fine detail. However, you might want to enable the autofocus accuracy, since more than the usual numbers of shots were out of focus.

Ascend P6 can take great 360-degree panoramic shots, with great stitching on the downside it takes about 10 seconds to complete the stitching process. The front-facing camera, 5 MP fixed focus, is capable of providing perfect portraits, especially with the Beauty shot (skin smoothing effect).

The main camera of P6 is has the capability to record videos at a maximum of 1080p @ 30fps and for HDR it can go up to 720p, while the front camera can go to 720p@30fps. The camcorder interface, similar to the camera one, can enable the face effects. The video quality, coupled with the darkness present in the HDR while not even increasing the details, and this is one of the areas where we think Huawei will need to work on, since the imaging and videos are becoming an increasingly common used feature of the smartphones.

The Huawei Ascend P6 provides the regular options in connectivity as per any Android phone in the mid to top tier category of course, this means all of the prominent connection options are present and accounted for, including Wi-Fi, GPS, HSPA which has the download rate of 21 Mbit/s and the upload rate of 5.76 Mbit/s, and Bluetooth connectivity however, NFC and 4G are absent from the list. The device also enables users to make their devices a portable Wi-Fi hotspot via a utility.

DLNA connectivity is present for wireless media streaming to your smart TV or console, and the device can be hooked up to your computer via a microUSB slot on top of the phone. The connectivity with computer provides the option to connect as a Media Device or USB storage. Also, the File Manager app provides an easy way to access any files you get to your phone without having to search.

The Huawei Ascend P6's 2000mAh battery is almost fine for a quad-core smartphone with a bright 720p HD display. It is a surprise that Huawei made the battery work with the device size and weight still in such good play.

The phone managed to produce a full day of use the phone from normal usage, including some web browsing, a little gaming, some calls and emails and messages with a sufficient amount left. Huawei states that it has applied a couple of energy-saving technologies into the Ascend P6 for this. Huawei's Quick Power Control (QPC) and Automated Discontinuous Reception (ADRX) tech is also used to improve power consumption.

As is visible from the above review, there is very little the Ascend P6 does not cater to. Below are some shortcomings that the device does possess:

• Battery is non-exchangeable (device is single piece)
• Audio output was somewhat unsatisfactory
• Among the peers, the video recording is not up to expectations
• There is no support provided for LTE or NFC

The Ascend P6 is the thinnest smartphone on sale at this time, but the device actually has much more tricks up its sleeve than only the width to capture interest from the wider audience.

The Ascend P6 has completely revamped the Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean edition thanks to Huawei's own Emotion UI. An outstanding 720p IPS+ display credits to a lot of success of the device, coupled with the MagicTouch feature, that makes the device touch become more sensitive and thus attractive to those people who sometimes complain about the reduction of sensitivity in the touch feature smartphones. Huawei has added proprietary add-ons, such as the ability to switch phone profiles, the large repository of customizable themes, the much improved power management capabilities, an editor for Office documents, customizable keyboard, the improvement in sound using Dolby Mobile and codec support for proper video playback.

The cool 8MP back and 5MP front cameras, with their increased resolution, and wider angle of image capture are attractive, though Huawei can improve on this area a bit more to capture the complete attention of an ever-increasing audience. The 1.5 GHz quad-core processor, manufactured by Huawei as well, is perfectly utilized, as is the non-removable battery aided by a much improved power management, to deliver a great performer.

In short, the Ascend P6 is an impressive device. The phone contains something of interest for every user and that definitely makes it worth your attention and respect. The Ascend P6 is a definite winner, and this is bound to pressure the competitors. It will not surprise us if the sales of Ascend P6 double in the next quarter or so. Huawei has won the respect of many from this device, and if they perform this way in the future, the big guns will have a tough time keeping up to the innovation of this current underdog.