Huawei’s really starting to make a splash in the American smartphone market, breaking into the Big Four with the launch of the T-Mobile Comet not long ago — but it’s the budget regionals where these guys might have a chance to dominate. MetroPCS has taken a cue from archrival Cricket in launching Huawei’s Ascend today, offering a 3.5-inch HVGA display, 3.2 megapixel camera, and microSD memory expansion to 16GB atop Android 2.1. The $179 they’re asking seems a bit steep for the specs until you remember that MetroPCS offers its hardware contract-free — and it’ll save you a dime or two over the carrier’s name-brand Android offering, the Optimus M from LG. It’s available today; follow the break for the full press release.
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab isn’t the only 7-inch Android slate taking on Steve Jobs’ iPad preferences; Huawei still falls short of being a household name, but the company has nonetheless managed to get its Ideos S7 tablet on Best Buy shelves alongside the Galaxy Tab later this month. It’ll also make its European debut in early December, and at $299.99/£288 it’s also significantly cheaper than the Tab, though with a few understandable compromises along the way. Keep reading for our full Huawei S7 preview.
To be clear, the S7 we have is a pre-production unit, so we won’t be treating this as a full review; instead it’s a preview of the Huawei, and certain aspects may be subject to change by the time the slate goes on sale. It’s been loaned to us by the guys at Clove.co.uk, who expect to have UK stock of the S7 in the first week of December 2010.
Hardware
As we saw back at IFA 2010, the Huawei S7 has a 7-inch touchscreen and a sturdy, discretely designed chassis. Unlike the 1024 x 600 resolution capacitive panel on the Galaxy Tab, the S7 makes do with a WVGA 800 x 480 display and a resistive touchscreen; there’s a short stylus in a slot on the side. Physical controls include home, menu and back buttons down the left bezel (they look like touch-sensitive keys, but they’re actually real buttons) and call/end buttons on the right bezel, flanking an optical trackpad.
On the left edge there’s a volume rocker, while the power button is on the top right corner. Ports, meanwhile, include a headphone socket on the top left, power and microUSB on the right edge, and a microSD card slot and proprietary docking connector on the bottom. There’s no camera on the back, unlike the Galaxy Tab, but you do get a front-facing 2-megapixel webcam for video calls. A useful addition is the flip-out kickstand which can prop the S7 up at a useful angle for watching videos.
Under the battery cover is a SIM card slot for the S7′s quadband GSM/EDGE, quadband UMTS/HSDPA (850/900/1900/2100) modem. Other wireless options are WiFi b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, while the USB port will function as an OTG Host for plugging in peripherals. Huawei haven’t loaded a 3G hotspot app, however. There’s both an accelerometer for automatic screen rotation and a light sensor, though we found the brightness only really seemed to respond to Huawei’s custom control on the homescreen. As for the battery, that’s a 2,200 mAh Li-Ion pack – considerably smaller than the Tab’s 4,000 mAh – which Huawei reckon is good for up to four hours of use. We couldn’t get the S7 to charge via the microUSB port, only from the dedicated AC adapter.
We can’t really argue with the build quality, even of this pre-production unit, and the S7 feels sturdy in the hand. At 500g it’s 120g more than the Galaxy Tab, as well as being a little longer and thicker; however the Tab is broader and has fewer buttons (it lacks a trackpad or D-pad, for instance, or the physical call/end keys). The S7 feels more comfortable in landscape orientation, and indeed the homescreen is locked in that mode; only the apps will rotate.
Inside there’s an ARM Cortex A8 processor running at 768MHz, paired with 512MB of RAM and a mere 512MB of ROM. There’s also 4GB of user storage (which can be expanded via microSD cards) in the shipping models.
Huawei S7 hands-on & Galaxy Tab comparison:
Software
Huawei has used Android 2.1 Eclair on the S7, rather than 2.2 Froyo, complete with a customized UI to make it more tablet-friendly. Unlike Samsung, with their various custom apps for the Galaxy Tab, the S7′s modifications are limited to the homescreen; there are five homescreen sections – Home, Web, Entertainment, Communications and Favorites – each with two panes for widgets and icons, and the app menu button has been shifted to the bottom right hand corner. Along the top of the display, the usual Android notification bar has been replaced with a row of icons: there’s a clock on the far left, then controls for Bluetooth, WiFi, brightness, mobile signal, battery and Huawei’s task switcher.
These are all well placed, and the task switcher is a useful addition. As well as showing new notifications (the “i” icon flashes when there’s an update) it has a list of all running apps, each of which can be ended from the menu itself. Unlike Samsung’s usage widget there’s no indication of memory status or CPU load, which we did miss somewhat.
Performance
The resistive touchscreen and stylus will have sent a shiver down the spines of many, but the S7 touch experience isn’t as bad as it could be. It’s helped by the fact that Android itself is unsurprisingly a finger-friendly OS, so we could navigate and type on the well-spaced on-screen keyboard without pulling out the plastic toothpick. The notes app allows for sketches, which we managed to do without any jagged edges, but we still stuck to a fingertip for most use.
What you do find is that the amount of pressure needed on a resistive panel is significantly higher than for a capacitive screen, and that can make for tiring or sluggish-feeling use. There’s no multitouch, either, so zooming in the browser requires you either hit the zoom buttons at the bottom of the display, or double-tap on text. We had mixed results with the text reflowing, too; sometimes a double-tap would resize paragraphs to take advantage of the full screen, other times not.
There’s no Flash Player 10.1 support, and Huawei hasn’t said anything about a Froyo update or, indeed, transitioning the S7 to any later version of Android. Still, the browser renders quickly, though we couldn’t see as much on-screen at at time as on the higher-resolution Tab. It was only during browsing that the WVGA resolution really made itself known, with blocky text when zoomed out; usable, certainly, but you’re not getting any more pixels than on a regular Android handset.
Thanks to the 3G modem, the S7 gets access to the Android Market; however somewhat oddly we couldn’t find certain titles that would show up on other devices, like Angry Birds. We were able to side-load them via USB, however (the S7 shows up as a mass storage device). Thanks to the standard resolution, we had no problems running downloaded apps full-screen, though they can look a little sparse when stretched out to 7-inches.
It’s an issue that extends to most of the software, and highlights one of the reasons Android tablets in general have been so patchy. The Galaxy Tab worked because Samsung had obviously invested time and engineer effort into tweaking apps to suit not just the resolution but the screen size; Huawei’s less comprehensive changes mean you’re stuck with the normal email app, which wastes screen space because it’s designed for a 4.3-inch or less display, while the dialler sits tiny buttons in a sea of black. You can use the S7 for voice calls (as well as SMS and MMS), but like the Tab there’s no earpiece, only the speakerphone.
The camera app records video and stills, but the results are as blurry as you’d expect for 2-megapixels. There’s no UMTS video calling, only via apps like Fring, and taking shots of anything other than your face is tricky what the absence of a physical shutter button.
Battery life is the biggest stumbling block. Whereas the Galaxy Tab managed a couple of days of mixed use, we managed to drain the S7 in under two hours. Admittedly that’s with the screen at maximum brightness – strong, but certainly not the brightest we’ve seen – and both WiFi and 3G turned on, but even shutting off the cellular connection and dropping the backlighting to a usable 50-percent left us hunting for the AC adapter well before the three hour mark.
Wrap-Up
Again, it’s worth mentioning that this is a pre-production S7, and Huawei could well refine the experience before the final units ship. We’re hoping there are some last minute power management tweaks being made, since the S7′s lacklustre runtimes are probably the tablet’s biggest flaw. The resistive touchscreen feels on the cheap side, but then this is a cheap slate; we could live with the display, even the WVGA resolution, but as the iPad has shown, battery life is everything if you want to make a convincing argument for a companion device.
In the end, the comparatively low resolution and short battery life leave us feeling that the S7 fails to sufficiently differentiate itself from big-screen Android smartphones like the Desire HD or EVO 4G. They squeeze the same number of pixels into longer-lasting, smaller packages. Meanwhile the Galaxy Tab, while significantly more expensive than the Huawei, offers a more consistent user experience and one better suited to the tablet form-factor. The Huawei S7 is an okay cheap Android tablet, but okay doesn’t seem good enough in today’s market.
Huawei might be making inroads into the US consumersmartphone market, but the Chinese telecom supplier’s attempts to break into big business have been stonewalled. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that Sprint is excluding both Huawei and competitor ZTE from a multi-billion dollar contract — where they would have been the lowest bidders — primarily because of national security concerns. The US Secretary of Commerce reportedly called Sprint CEO Dan Hesse to voice concerns about letting firms with possible ties to the Chinese government supply local communications infrastructure, a perspective also penned by eight US senators back in August. “DoD is very concerned about China’s emerging cyber capabilities and any potential vulnerability within or threat to DoD networks,” the Department of Defense told the publication, without naming Huawei or ZTE directly. We’re not doctors, but it sounds like someone’s got a serious case of supercomputer envy.
In 2010, does a phone need to have a 4.3-inch display, a gigahertz (or greater) processor, and a one-bazillion megapixel camera with xenon flash and continuous autofocus to be relevant? How about important? Or even — dare we say it — awesome? Is that even remotely possible? At a glance, T-Mobile’s Comet from Huawei is a totally forgettable phone, just another anonymous ultra-low end handset that isn’t going to impress anyone (except maybe your accountant). But let’s consider the facts: at $9.99 on contract, it’s an insane deal for a newly-introduced smartphone, and it’s by far the lowest subsidized price for any Android device ever released in the US. In fact, it’s within shouting distance of free. It runs stock Android 2.2. A regional variation of the Huawei Ideos, it was designed with help from Google. Oh, and yeah, it’s one of the first T-Mobile devices to feature WiFi hotspot support. Is your interest sufficiently piqued? Read on.
In 2010, does a phone need to have a 4.3-inch display, a gigahertz (or greater) processor, and a one-bazillion megapixel camera with xenon flash and continuous autofocus to be relevant? How about important? Or even — dare we say it — awesome? Is that even remotely possible? At a glance, T-Mobile’s Comet from Huawei is a totally forgettable phone, just another anonymous ultra-low end handset that isn’t going to impress anyone (except maybe your accountant). But let’s consider the facts: at $9.99 on contract, it’s an insane deal for a newly-introduced smartphone, and it’s by far the lowest subsidized price for any Android device ever released in the US. In fact, it’s within shouting distance of free. It runs stock Android 2.2. A regional variation of the Huawei Ideos, it was designed with help from Google. Oh, and yeah, it’s one of the first T-Mobile devices to feature WiFi hotspot support. Is your interest sufficiently piqued? Read on.
The argument used to be that carriers’ higher pricing for smartphone data plans were what kept them out of the low end, regardless of the upfront on-contract cost — but now that T-Mobile has rolled out a 200MB / $10 package, phones like the Comet — a T-Mobile branded version of the Huawei Ideos announced at IFA — might actually pose a serious threat to the livelihoods of dumbphones everywhere. Why’s that? Well, the carrier will be charging a ridiculously low $9.99 on contract after $50 rebate for it, featuring 7.2Mbps HSPA, FM radio, integrated Swype, microSD expansion up to 32GB, and 802.11b / g / n atop Froyo; in fact, the only immediately-obvious downside to it is that it’s got just a 2.8-inch QVGA display. As you might recall, Huawei worked closely with Google to design the Ideos as an Android device for the masses, and we came away with a pretty positive impression with it when we checked it out at IFA — so we’re bullish that this thing is going to make some waves in its Comet guise. It launches on November 3 — and you’ll be able to get it in prepaid guise through some third-party retailers for “less than $200.”
What happens when you punch the phrase “Droid” into a Costco sales terminal? If Boy Genius Report‘s sources are right, you see the Motorola Droid 2 Global ring up (in black and white!) for $199.99. Considering we’re also seeing the 1.2GHz quad-band worldphone on a Verizon rebate sheet, it’s a pretty safe bet the handset’s coming out soon — and if Verizon also lists the phone for that price, it could be the death knell for the A955. (We’ve gotten several tips today that the original Droid 2 has been marked for end-of-life at Best Buy.) There’s also a T-Mobile Comet pictured above, also known as the Huawei Ideos, a low-budget Android smartphone whose $149.99 price will almost certainly be free of two-year contracts. Of course, in the spirit of Costco you probably won’t get off that easily — subliminal messaging will surely compel you to purchase the $24.99 Ewoks and Star Wars Droids Adventure Hour on DVD.
Who says Motorola and HTC should have all the big-screen Android fun? Huawei aren’t especially known for their alluring smartphones, but the new IDEOS X6 could change all that. Packing a 4.1-inch WVGA touchscreen, 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and HDMI output, the IDEOS X6 runs Android 2.2 Froyo and, if they can manage to bring it over to Europe or North America, deserves some attention.
There’s also an LED flash, 720p HD recording, 2D/3D hardware acceleration and USB 2.0, while wireless connectivity includes HSPA+, WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth and GPS/A-GPS. RAM is 512MB while the ROM is a healthy 2GB; there’s also a microSD card slot, as you’d expect.
That’s all packaged up into a handset measuring just 122 x 66 x 10 mm, which makes for quite the pocket-friendly smartphone. No word on pricing, but let’s hope some ambitious carrier picks the Huawei IDEOS X6 up soon.
Cricket Crosswave MiFi from Huawei technologies, is available today for pre-order, and it looks like it’s time to give Verizon a little run for their money. This device looks pretty slick and offers wireless 3G internet for up to four devices, 3-hour usable battery life, and up to 32 GB removable memory slot.
Crosswave supports nearly all Wi-Fi devices including iPad, iTouch, and iPhone. So why pay $130 for the 3G iPad when you can get a Crosswave for $105?
The site claims that you can also send and receive text messages. This seems like a wasted feature if people most likely to buy this device are already carrying a laptop, iPad, or some type of mobile device. It feels like Huawei created this feature just to say they did. What do you think?
When the Huawei Ascend launches on prepaid carrier Cricket Wireless later this month, it will cost $150. That’s not after a rebate or with a two-year agreement, mind you — for three portraits of Ulysses S. Grant, you actually own the phone. Of course, you always get what you pay for to some degree, and the Ascend certainly isn’t a top-tier device — it’s a humble HVGA handset made of cheap plastic that felt like it wouldn’t survive a drop. The 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen was dull and actually slightly rough to the touch, and the 3.2 megapixel fixed-focus camera around back doesn’t shoot VGA video (just CIF), let alone quality snapshots. Still, it’s got physical buttons in all the right places (including a bendy metal Send / Menu / Back / End panel on the bottom) and a surprisingly responsive Android 2.1 UI with a few neat quirks — like a nine-panel home screen — so we could honestly see this EV-DO Rev. A handset being a pretty fantastic Android for first-time users. We’d choose it over the Motorola Citrus in a heartbeat, that’s for sure, especially when Cricket gets its Sprint roaming agreement in order later this year. Of course, that’s assuming the Huawei Ideos doesn’t arrive at an even cheaper pricepoint. We’ve got a brief video of the Ascend after the break, as well as a MiFi-like Huawei device called the Crosswave — won’t you give it a look?
