Huawei Ascend Mate review: Gentle giant

Google Now

Google Now gives you a short overview of information it believes is relevant to you right now. It can interpret a lot of things from your search history as well. If you've been searching for, let's say, your favorite football team, Google Now will prepare a card showing you the next match the team is playing and will provide you score updates once the game begins.

Google Now

Voice Actions can handle stuff like sending messages (SMS or email), initiating a voice call, asking for directions, taking a note or opening a site. Google Now can also launch apps, check and manage your calendar and look for nearby places of interest and stuff like movie openings in theaters.

Google Now on the Huawei Ascend Mate gets activated with an upward-swipe from the virtual navigation bar. Unfortunately this gesture works everywhere but the homescreen. That's right - you need to have an app opened to launch Google Now.

Running Google Now

You can either type or talk to it and the app will give you one of its info cards (if available) and read you its contents aloud (you can disable this in the app settings). If there's no card to help with the answer to your question Google Now will simply initiate a Google web search instead.

Synthetic benchmarks

The Ascend Mate is powered by Huawei's own K3V2 chipset. There are four 1.5GHz Cortex A9 cores, a 16-core GPU and 2GB of RAM. The Cortex A9 processor is already dated piece of tech, but it's still quite capable of keeping Android running smoothly on a 720p screen. The Samsung Galaxy SIII, for instance, uses a similar processor and it still gets the job done.

Starting off with BenchmarkPi and Linpack, the Ascend Mate posted pretty good scores, on par with the Galaxy S III. Of course, it wasn't able to match the more recent flagships in our database.

Benchmark Pi

Lower is better

• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)
  132
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)
  132
• LG Optimus G Pro
  147
• HTC One
  151
• Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3
  169
• Sony Xperia Z
  264
• HTC Butterfly
  266
• Oppo Find 5
  267
• HTC One X+
  280
• LG Optimus G
  285
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  305
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  330
• Huawei Ascend Mate
  347
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  350
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  359
• Meizu MX 4-core
  362
• Nexus 4
  431

Linpack

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)
  791
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)
  788
• LG Optimus G Pro
  743
• HTC One
  646
• Sony Xperia Z
  630
• HTC Butterfly
  624
• LG Optimus G
  608
• Oppo Find 5
  593
• Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3
  400
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  214.3
• Nexus 4
  213.5
• Meizu MX 4-core
  189.1
• HTC One X+
  177.7
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  175.5
• Huawei Ascend Mate
  161
• HTC One X
  160.9
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  141.5

When it comes to the multiple-core perfromance, the Huawei Ascend Mate behaved similarly to its quad-core Cortex-A9 powered rivals.

Geekbench 2

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)
  3324
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)
  3227
• LG Optimus G Pro
  3040
• HTC One
  2708
• Sony Xperia Z
  2173
• HTC Butterfly
  2143
• Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3
  1894
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1845
• Huawei Ascend Mate
  1725
• LG Optimus G
  1723
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  1661
• iPhone 5
  1601

AnTuTu

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)
  26275
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)
  24716
• HTC One
  22678
• Sony Xperia Z
  20794
• LG Optimus G Pro
  20056
• HTC Butterfly
  19513
• Huawei Ascend Mate
  15714
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  15547
• Oppo Find 5
  15167
• Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3
  13621

Quadrant

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)
  12446
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)
  12376
• LG Optimus G Pro
  12105
• HTC One
  11746
• Sony Xperia Z
  8075
• HTC One X+
  7632
• LG Optimus G
  7439
• Oppo Find 5
  7111
• Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3
  7059
• HTC One X
  5952
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  5916
• Huawei Ascend Mate
  5509
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  5450
• Meizu MX 4-core
  5170
• Nexus 4
  4567

We've added some GPU benchmarks for good measure to test out the undisclosed 16-core graphics chip inside the Ascend Mate. The Mate didn't do too well here.

GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt (1080p off-screen)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)
  43
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)
  41
• HTC One
  37
• Oppo Find 5
  32
• Google Nexus 4
  32
• Sony Xperia Z
  31
• Sony Xperia ZL
  31
• Sony Xperia SP
  31
• Apple iPhone 5
  30
• LG Optimus G Pro
  30
• LG Optimus G
  21
• Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3
  17
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  17
• Huawei Ascend Mate
  15
• HTC One X
  11

Epic Citadel

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)
  59.8
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)
  57.1
• HTC One
  56.4
• Sony Xperia Z
  55.6
• Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3
  55.5
• LG Optimus G Pro
  54.2
• Nexus 4
  53.9
• Asus Padfone 2
  53.4
• LG Optimus G
  52.6
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  41.3
• Oppo Find 5
  38.6
• Huawei Ascend Mate
  33.2

SunSpider is based on JavaScript performance and the two browsers available on the Ascend Mate (the stock one and Chrome) scored similar results.

SunSpider

Lower is better

• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)
  804
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)
  810
• Samsung Ativ S
  891
• Apple iPhone 5
  915
• Nokia Lumia 920
  910
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  972
• HTC One X+
  1001
• LG Optimus G Pro
  1011
• Motorola RAZR i XT890
  1059
• Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3
  1065
• HTC One
  1124
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1192
• Meizu MX 4-core
  1312
• Sony Xperia Z
  1336
• LG Optimus G
  1353
• HTC Butterfly
  1433
• Huawei Ascend Mate
  1741
• Nexus 4
  1971
• Oppo Find 5
  2045

Vellamo focuses on JavaScript and HTML 5 and is where the Ascend Mate did quite well to match the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S III and the Oppo Find 5.

Vellamo

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  2418
• HTC One
  2382
• Sony Xperia Z
  2189
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  2078
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)
  2060
• Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)
  2056
• Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3
  1887
• HTC Butterfly
  1866
• Oppo Find 5
  1658
• Huawei Ascend Mate
  1646
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1641
• LG Optimus 4X HD
  1568
• LG Optimus G
  1522
• Meizu MX 4-core
  1468
• Nexus 4
  1310

The Huawei Ascend Mate did about as expected in our benchmark tests. We can safely say it's more or less on par with some of the 2012 flagships.

The real life experience though raised no questions about the performance. The Ascend Mate behaves nicely and feels quite responsive.