Ascend P7, a time-bound winner

techknow beat

by Bilal Iqbal

It may not look like so, but Huawei happens to be the third-largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. Yes, you heard that right. According to a July 2014 report by Strategy Analytics, Huawei was just behind Apple (number 2) and Samsung (number 1) in the global smartphone race, increasing its share from 4.8% of the world smartphone market in the second quarter of 2013 to 6.8% in 2014. The shipments almost doubled — from 11.1 million phones to 20.1 million.

Granted most of these sales come from China and the lower segment of the smartphone market, where Huawei consistently delivers some of the best bang for the buck. But the not-so-little Chinese giant does like to play with the big boys too at times, recently in the form of the 6-inch monster Ascend Mate7 and the smaller but very desirable Ascend P7.

To sweeten the deal, Carrefour in Qatar is selling the P7 at the discounted price of QR1,200 until this Saturday, down from its list price of QR1,700. The phone in question offers you a 5-inch Full High Definition screen with 4G in a body that weighs just 124grams. It even manages to cram in a decent-sounding (more on that later) 2,500mah battery. You get expandable storage, 2gb of RAM, 13mp back camera, and an 8mp front camera.

The chipset is where the phone does go a little wrong, offering Huawei’s own HiSilicon Kirin 910T, which is four Cortex-A9 cores running at 1.8ghz paired to a Mali 450 GPU. This chipset tends to perform on par with the likes of Samsung Galaxy S4, losing out in the graphics department. To put things in perspective, Galaxy S6 is expected around March 2015 — in other words, three more months and P7’s chipset will be two generations behind the best of the best. That said, by all accounts, the chipset is more than capable of running Android smoothly through the day. Of course faster processors will do much better overall, especially on browsing through heavy web pages.

The back camera gets commendations for its performance. In the words of Tech Radar: “The Huawei Ascend P7 has two cameras and both are winners.” The tech website praises the camera for images that are not over-processed. “Images taken at the full 13MP resolution come off the Ascend P7 at between 4MB and a massive 7MB in size, and are refreshingly free from JPEG-style artefacts.” Trusted Reviews found that the camera though good, could not compete in the same category as Galaxy S5 and the likes — not to worry, the P7 does not compete in that segment. The front camera also won its fair share of praise, although the GSMArena found that a 5mp front camera on Oppo Find 7a (another Chinese phone that competes in the premium segment) produced better results overall. Needless to say, for the price, you should be sufficiently pleased with the results the phone produces.

The user interface of the P7 is something long-time Android may take a little getting used to. Huawei has doused the Android 4.4 Kit Kat in its own EmotionUI 2.3, which — like just about all Chinese phones available internationally — does away with the app tray. The approach is generally described to be iPhone-isque and simpler to use. Frankly speaking, I prefer the versatility offered by the traditional Android approach. However, I do like the fact that Huawei has incorporated Android soft key and done away with physical keys (which Samsung still clings on to). Even so, if you are a long-time Android user, you may want to play around with the phone for a while in the store to make sure you are comfortable with the UI.   

Given the chipset’s middling performance, and almost as big a battery life as on the Galaxy S4, the battery test on GSMArena disappointed, scoring just 53 hours (Galaxy S4 scored 65 hours). The P7’s 3G talk time is decent at 13.5 hours (S4 does 11). The web browsing score also beats S4, lasting a little over 7 hours on a single charge with S4 lasting just under 7. The phone loses out in the video playback, however, lasting just over 8 hours, while the S4 lasted over 11 hours on the same test. If you like to watch a lot of videos on your phone, you might want to be extra cautious with this phone. Tech Radar also found that the battery was bad in a low-reception area — if you don’t get strong signals where you live or work, you may encounter even worse battery life.

Generally though, the GSMArena score of 53 hours itself indicates that you should just be able to pull through a day of moderate usage with some restraint. Heavy users will just have to charge the phone through their work day — that’s just the price you have to pay for having a phone as thin as this.

This brings us to the biggest selling feature of the Ascend P7 — its desirability. The phone is made from high quality materials. It is just 6.5mm thick. To compare, the S4 is 7.9mm thick, and even the mighty iPhone 6, touted for its thin frame, comes in at 6.9 mm. The P7 is seriously thin. I will be the first ones to acknowledge that svelte dimensions are not everything, but if these things matter a lot to you, then you can hardly do better than P7 — it’s a metal-body glass-enclosed super thin 4G smartphone all for the price of QR1,200.

At its listed price of QR1,700, the P7 does find itself out of depth — there it competes with 2014 flagships like Galaxy S5 (can be had for slightly more), Xperia Z1 (can be had for slightly less), and Xperia Z2 (can be had for slightly higher). These phones retail for much higher and you generally have to wait for special offers to grab them at P7 list prices, but you should also find them for cheap in the open market.

At QR1,200, however, there is little that can directly compete with the P7. The S4 itself can be found around Qatar on offers that bring its effective prices down to as much as around QR1,400. You do get a more mature UI and product, but you lose out on the premium feel, even as you pay slightly more. We are talking effective prices here though, accounting for shopping coupons and bundle deals — the Carrefour price is a flat QR1,200 until this Saturday.

If QR1,200 is all you have to spend on a smartphone, you can’t do better than P7 at present. The quirks are something you can learn to live with and the looks are unmatched in this and much higher price segments.

The Huawei Ascend P7 is a winner, if only until Saturday.

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