Huawei Vision review: Farsighted

Phonebook

Beyond the deeply-customized entrance, the Vision is quick to retreat to the familiar territory of vanilla Android. The stock phonebook is a good example of this - although the functionality is of course intact.

The stock Gingerbread phonebook

What we missed is the Stream feature of the Huawei Honor, which displayed Twitter and Facebook feeds by your contacts.

Telephony

The Vision held on to signal without trouble and audio was good on both ends of calls. Just like the Honor, it doesn't have video calls out of the box. Apps like Tango or Skype can be a way around this.

The dialer

The dialer app hasn't got smart dialing enabled either.

What we liked about the Huawei Vision was its top notch loudspeaker. You'll have no trouble hearing the ring of an incoming call with this one.

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringing phone, dB	Overall score
Apple iPhone 4	65.1	60.3	66.2	Below Average
Samsung Galaxy Nexus	66.2	60.5	69.0	Below Average
Apple iPhone 4S	65.8	64.5	74.6	Average
Huawei U8860 Honor	71.2	68.6	75.7	Good
Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II	70.0	66.6	75.7	Good
Motorola RAZR XT910	74.7	66.6	82.1	Very Good
Huawei Vision	76.8	66.5	78.4	Very Good
HTC Desire	76.6	75.7	84.6	Excellent

Input method

The QWERTY keyboard on the Huawei Vision has seen some changes and now looks like the one on the updated final version of the Honor.

The updated QWERTY keyboard

It's slightly more elaborate than the regular old Android keyboard and features three shortcuts on either side of the space bar, instead of the more common two.