Huawei Ascend Mate2 4G review: Value king

Gallery

Huawei Ascend Mate2 4G comes with a highly-capable image gallery. As there is no dedicated video player, it's also used to play videos. It defaults to the standard Album view, where you see all of your media divided by albums. Video files are signified by a special icon.

The gallery app

The settings menu lets you do simple edits to a photo (rotate, crop) or go into a more capable editor with a lot more options. The editor offers light adjustments (so you can bring out the shadows or the highlights), effects, color styles, red eye correction, straightening a photo, sharpening and face glow (which detects faces automatically). Most of these options have a slider that lets you fine-tune the intensity of the effect.

There's a capable image editor on board

Video player

The Huawei Ascend Mate2 4G doesn't have much of a video player - you just open videos from the gallery and that's that. On the up side, it handled most videos we threw at it - all the way up to 1080p, DivX, XviD, MKV and even WMV.

The video player

We had no issues with sound either - AC3 and DTS codecs give most phones a headache - and there's Dolby Mobile 3.0+ available to enhance the audio.

You get play/pause and a slider to scrub through the video plus a Dolby on/off switch. That's it.

The integrated video player (just like the Music player) offers non-customizable equalizer presets only when you plug a pair of headphones in. You can pop up the preset list with a tap on the Dolby Mobile virtual switch at the top of the Now Playing screen. In case you are using the loudspeaker, a tap on the Dolby logo will just turn on or off the Dolby Mobile enhancement.

Subtitles are supported, you just need to name the subtitle file the same as the video.

The 6.1 HD display is perfect for watching movies on the go. In case you need more functionality, you can also download a third-party movie player.

Music player

The device comes with an app called Music that is an updated version of the stock music player. It has a well-laid out, easy to navigate interface

The music player

The Now playing interface features more eye-candy including album art. You can swipe to skip tracks or tap on one of the floating album covers to bring out a list of all songs in that album.

The now playing interface

Curiously, the music player does not feature an equalizer. It only has a DTS on/off button.

FM radio

Huawei Ascend Mate2 4G has a built-in FM receiver. It can play through the headset or the loudspeaker, but you'll need to have the headset plugged in as it serves as an antenna. We were disappointed not to find RDS - radio stations need to be named by hand.

The FM radio

Audio output is great, for the most part

The Huawei Ascend Mate2 4G audio output is quite impressive when used with an active external amplifier. The phablet aced the first part of our test, posting perfect scores top to bottom with very high volume levels to boot.

The volume is every bit as high even when you plug in a pair of headphones, but the output degrades a bit. Quite a lot of harmonic distortion creeps in, while the stereo crosstalk raises significantly. It's a very decent performance overall, but not quite as great as in the first test.

And here go the results so you can see for yourselves.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Huawei Ascend Mate2 4G	+0.02, -0.10	-93.1	92.9	0.0026	0.0076	-93.6
Huawei Ascend Mate2 4G (headphones attached)	+0.09, -0.13	-92.9	92.7	0.400	0.092	-35.5
Samsung Galaxy Note 3 Neo	+0.01, -0.03	-96.1	92.4	0.0091	0.013	-94.9
Samsung Galaxy Note 3 Neo (headphones attached)	+0.02, -0.04	-95.8	92.4	0.014	0.024	-57.2
Oppo N1	+0.14, -0.11	-93.7	93.4	0.0036	0.076	-83.7
Oppo N1 (headphones attached)	+0.31, -0.26	-93.2	92.4	0.0081	0.349	-55.5
HTC One Max	+0.14, -0.14	-93.8	93.8	0.0009	0.015	-94.1
HTC One Max (headphones attached)	+0.26, -0.02	-93.6	93.6	0.026	0.080	-80.4
LG Optimus G Pro	+0.48, -0.11	-81.7	82.0	0.010	0.028	-80.7
LG Optimus G Pro (headphones attached)	+0.31, -0.27	-81.1	81.1	0.0097	0.052	-66.2
Sony Xperia Z Ultra	+0.02, -0.08	-92.5	92.5	0.0058	0.011	-90.7
Sony Xperia Z Ultra (headphones attached)	+0.48, -0.11	-87.8	87.0	0.047	0.168	-51.9

Huawei Ascend Mate2 4G frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.

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