With Christmas just around the corner, plenty of you are currently on the lookout for a lovely Android tablet that'll bring a smile to the faces of your loved ones. This year has seen plenty of brilliant new models released, including the Tesco Hudl 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5, meaning that purchasing a good tablet is now cheaper and easier than ever. The power on offer in the top-end models has gone through the roof, while budget devices have improved massively. Unfortunately, this means that picking one has now become a very difficult task.

If you know that the iPad Air 2 or a device running Windows isn’t for you, then this is the place to be. Check out all of our top picks from the list below.

If, however, you'd like a little more guidance on what to look for when buying a new tablet, you should read our tablet buyer's guide, which explains the strengths and weaknesses of each type of tablet and anything else you may need to consider, technical or otherwise.

One of the golden rules you need to remember when looking at Android tablets is that you should steer clear of cheap, no-name models. There are a countless number of them available from various vendors and they're almost never worth purchasing, mainly because they don't tend to last very long.

As for the 'best' Android tablet, there isn't really one at the moment. What we do have is a number of great Android tablets that perform some tasks better than others, whether that's gaming, work or general entertainment. What's best for you may be very different from what the person next to you might need.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5

Best 10-inch Android tablet

Key features:
   

• 10.5-inch, 2,560 x 1,600 Super AMOLED screen
• Exynos 5 Octa 5420 CPU
• Over 14 hours video playback

This has one of the finest screens of any tablet of any type. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5's display is stunning, and a marvel for watching video. It's also among the slimmest and lightest tablets of its size and packs in a few extras like expandable storage and a fingerprint reader, though the latter isn't all that good.

Performance is also excellent, while battery life is fantastic, at over 14 hours. Elsewhere you've got all the usual extras such as front and rear cameras and stereo speakers, while a somewhat clunky but still useful case system seals the detail. It's simply the best 10-inch Android tablet around.

Price: £344 (£399 at time of review) / $374.99

Nexus 9

Best 8-inch or 9-inch Android tablet

Key features:

• 8.9-inch, 2,048 x 1,536 IPS LCD screen
• Powerful GPU
• Good battery life
• Android 5.0 Lollipop

The Nexus 9 looks starkly different to Google’s previous tablets. It is far broader and the 8.9-inch display, with an aspect ratio of 4:3, isn’t as good for viewing widescreen movies as previous Nexuses, but games and apps feel much nicer. Colours are excellent, viewing angles are good and the 281ppi screen is nice and clear. At 425g and 7.9mm thick, it’s also comfortable enough to hold for extended periods of time.

One of the standout features is that, unlike any of its rivals who will have to wait for the software, it ships with Android 5.0 Lollipop. The battery life, combined with the powerful GPU, allow for an excellent gaming experience. The 8- and 1.6-megapixel rear- and front-facing cameras aren't the best you'll ever come across, but it's a terrific piece of kit nonetheless.

Price: £299.99 (£319 at time of review) / $349.99

Asus MeMO Pad 7 ME572C

Best 7-inch Android tablet

Key features:

• Excellent screen
• Good battery life
• Attractive design

The Asus-manufactured Nexus 7 (2013) made the 7-inch Android tablet market its own, with its combination of solid specs, excellent performance and tiny price tag. However, it’s not as young as it used to be, and Asus has taken aim at it with the MeMO Pad 7 ME572C. It’s a unique-looking slate, with curved sides and sharp corners, but lacks a soft-touch plastic rear. At 8.3mm thick and 269g, it’s also thinner and lighter than the Nexus, without holding back on battery life and performance.

If you’re after something that’ll keep the family entertained, you might be best off looking elsewhere. The speakers offer solid but unremarkable sound quality and are easy to block with your fingers. While the 1,920 x 1,200 pixel resolution screen delivers excellent viewing angles and good contrast and colours, our review sample suffered from backlight bleed. It's not perfect by any means, and while it’s not as cheap as the Nexus, it’s definitely a better all-round device.

Price: £179 / $326

Asus Memo Pad 7

Best sub-£100 Android tablet

Key features:

• 7-inch 1,280 x 800 IPS screen
• Intel Atom Z2560 CPU
• Android 4.4

When we reviewed the Asus Memo Pad 7 ME176CX, it was selling for almost £150. But with all the competition from tablets like the Hudl 2, it has now been price-dropped to £99.99 by many retailers, making it a bonafide bargain.

Screen resolution is decidedly sub-Retina grade and the design isn’t too flashy, but in most other respects this is a top-notch tablet. The Intel Atom Z2560 provides loads of power, you get a very generous (at the price) 16GB of storage, and while the screen doesn’t offer oodles of pixels, its quality level is otherwise pretty solid. If you can afford to push the boat out a little further, we think the Hudl 2 is better. But if £100 is your strict cut-off point, the Asus Memo Pad 7 ME176CX should be at the top of your list.

Price: £99.99 (£119.99 at time of review) / $124.99

Tesco Hudl 2

Best sub-£200 tablet
 
Key features:

• 8.3-inch 1,920 x 1,200 IPS screen
• Intel Atom Z3735D CPU
• Android 4.4

Tesco is hardly well-known as a top tablet manufacturer, but it's hit the ball out of the park with the Hudl 2. At £129 this is probably the best-value Android tablet ever made, potentially even trumping the Nexus 7. It gets you a great 8.3-inch, 1,920 x 1,200 display, giving you a bit more screen space than the long-standing Nexus model. This size of screen is great for watching movies on, without being so large that it’s a pain to carry around with you.

The quad-core Intel Atom CPU gets you plenty of power for high-end 3D games too, meaning there are few roadblocks despite the low price. There is, predictably, a bit of Tesco app bloat to deal with and general performance isn’t quite at Nexus 7 level. But for pure hardware value, you'll struggle to beat the Hudl 2.

Price: £129

Asus Transformer Pad TF701T

Best Android tablet for work

Key features:

• Great 10.1-inch, 2,560 x 1,600 pixel IGZO IPS screen
• Keyboard dock adds extra five hours of battery life
• 32/64GB versions available - expandable

The Transformer series convinced us that an Android tablet can work as a replacement for an ultra-portable laptop. Asus’ Transformer Pad TF701T has been around for a while now, but it’s still the best choice if Android is what you’re after and you're willing to spend enough cash for a real top-quality experience.

The 10.1-inch, 2,560 x 1,600 pixel resolution IGZO IPS screen produces super-sharp visuals and great viewing angles. It has an Nvidia Tegra 4 quad-core processor and apart from some minor jaggedy moments, it's a slick operator. One of the most impressive features of the Transformer is the battery life: the TF701T gives you a combined 17 hours, or around 12 hours with just the tablet alone. Now available for under £350 with the keyboard base, it’s a great pick.

Price: £328.99 (£430 at time of review)

Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 (2014)

Best Android tablet for entertainment

Key features:

• Brilliant speakers
• Excellent 8.9-inch, 2,560 x 1,600 resolution screen
• Attractive, lightweight design

If you’re in the market for an Android tablet built for entertainment, you won’t find anything better than Amazon's Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 (2014) right now. It boasts the same excellent design qualities as its predecessor, the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9, and at 374g, the Wi-Fi only model is significantly lighter than even the iPad Air 2 (437g).

The 8.9-inch, 2,560 x 1,600 pixel resolution display, with a sharpness level of 339ppi, is brilliant, delivering excellent colour accuracy and a higher level of brightness than the previous HDX model. It’s also great for reading, but can struggle with glare outdoors. The speakers are the best you’ll find on any tablet. With support for Dolby Atmos, they deliver a better, more immersive sense of directional sound than anything else on the market right now. The 2.5GHz Snapdragon 805 processor paired with 2GB of RAM and an Adreno 430 GPU make it excellent for both everyday use and gaming. Fire OS is still divisive, however.

Price: £329 / $379

Amazon Fire HD 6

Best Android tablet for kids
 
Key features:

• 6-inch, 1,280 x 800 pixel IPS screen
• Mediatek CPU
• 8/16GB storage
• Fire OS

The Amazon Fire HD 6 is one of the first sub-7-inch tablets we’ve seen. It uses a 6-inch screen, giving it proportions that kids are more likely to get on with. Just as important, it’s also cheap. At £80 for the 8GB version, you’re not going to have to cancel your kids' pocket money for a whole year if they accidentally drop it.

With tablets of this price, you generally have to deal with a great many hardware cuts, but there are remarkably few here. The Fire HD 6 has a good-quality IPS screen, a surprisingly powerful processor and very good battery life. It’s not as slim as we’d like and it uses Amazon’s more restrictive Fire OS rather than normal Android, but it’s still a corker for children or budget buyers.

Price: £79.99 / $99

Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2

Best tablet for drawing
 
Key features:

• 12.2-inch, 2,560 x 1,600 LCD screen
• Exynos 5 Octa 5420 CPU
• S Pen digitiser stylus

Artists out there who want to get creative with a tablet need to make sure they get something with an active digitiser stylus. This technology has been around for years, since before modern tablets existed, but only a few of today's best slates actually use the tech.

The Note series of Samsung tablets is where to head to first, and the biggest of the lot at present is the Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2. You don’t get the AMOLED screen of Samsung’s latest top-end tablets, but the large display makes a great virtual canvas when you team it up with the S Pen stylus and something like Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, which comes preinstalled.

With a 12.2-inch screen and 750g body, it’s not the smallest or lightest tablet around, but the extra scribble space is worth it for art enthusiasts. If you want something a bit smaller, check out the Note 10.1.

Price: £349 (£649 at time of review) / $599

Nvidia Shield Tablet

Best Android tablet for gaming

Key features:

• Brilliant gaming experience
• Impressive build quality
• Excellent display

For consumers who are seriously into gaming, look no further than the Nvidia Shield Tablet. It’s far and away the best tablet for gamers on the market right now, having been built to deliver the best experience possible. Under the hood, the custom-built Nvidia Tegra K1 processor clocked at 2.2GHz combined with a 192-core Kepler GPU and 2GB of RAM ensure smooth performance, even while simultaneously running high-end Android games and multiple apps.

In terms of design, it looks slightly like an enlarged HTC One M8, which is no bad thing. The front-facing speakers above and below the screen, along with a pair of speakers on the top and bottom edges, deliver sound that can easily fill a room. At 9.2mm thick, it isn’t the sleekest number we’ve ever seen, but the tapered edges make it comfortable to hold in one hand. The 8-inch, 1,920 x 1,200 display delivers rich colours but isn’t quite bright enough. Premium, Tegra-optimised games and the £49.99 Shield Controller cost extra, but they’re worth it if you're willing to splash the cash.

Price: £240 / $299

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Key Features: 4.7-inch 1,280 x 720 pixel IPS screen; Android 4.2; 13-megapixel camera with LED flash
Manufacturer: Alcatel

What is the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha?

The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is a bit of a departure from the phones from the Alcatel OneTouch stable. It’s higher-end, offering a more design-led approach than normal.

Some of its choices are rather odd, though, and its core hardware just isn’t quite good enough in one too many areas to justify the fairly elevated £300 SIM-free price. While Alcatel OneTouch is known best for its affordable phones, this one simply isn’t cheap enough. Even if you find it at a knockdown price, it suffers from a few serious issues.

Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha – Design

The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha wants to stand out from the crowd, at least a little. It’s a phone with clear plastic bits above and below the screen, where you find the LED lights for the phone’s notifications and soft keys.

We saw similar moves in some Sony phones of last year, including the Xperia SP. It gives the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha quite a striking look face-on – something that we don’t often see in Alcatel OneTouch phones.

In practical terms, this isn’t quite such a smash, though. While the lower plastic cut-out highlights the back, home and menu soft key icons, it’s only the non-illuminated area above that’s actually touch-sensitive. The soft keys aren't so much marked as mis-marked. You get used to this, of course, but it takes some shine off the design.

What’s less easy to get used to is quite how bright the notification LED is. We generally like our notification lights to be soft, simple glows that are easy to see yet not too distracting, but the Idol Alpha's triple LEDs are quite bright, with a large area of effect thanks to their light being fired through a diffuser before reaching the see-through area. You can thankfully tone down the notifications in the Settings menu, but there are only three options: off, mid and full.

A little like the Samsung Galaxy Alpha, the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is a mostly plastic phone with a band of aluminium running around the outside to give you a harder, more expensive feel.

The lightly bevelled edges are a little on the harsh side, but it’s a phone that looks and feels its money. It’s also nice to see a phone that isn't styled just like the competition. As detailed, though, any claims of originality are over-egged.

There’s one element of the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha hardware that we hate, though. And we think a lot of you will, too. It doesn’t have a 3.5mm headphone jack, instead forcing you to use an adapter that plugs into the microUSB slot. One comes bundled, but this strikes us as a terrible idea for a handful of reasons.

It means no listening while you’re charging, plus you need to remember to keep the bloody thing with you, and if you lose it you’re stuffed. As you have to use an adapter that sticks out a fair way, it also makes the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha hard to fit in some pockets with earphones attached. The final insult: the feature is flat-out broken in some respects, as the on-body speaker doesn't stop playing when used with certain headphones with inline remotes.

What were they thinking?

The headphone jack cull seems to be part of an attempt to make the OneTouch Idol Alpha as simple and streamlined as possible, but this is already scuppered by having so much screen bezel on show. The more futuristic-looking phones are almost all-screen. This one isn’t.

Another casualty of this hardware purification is the microSD slot. There’s a decent 16GB of internal storage, but that's not enough for the Idol Alpha to be used as a serious music or video player.

Aside from the microUSB port, the only slot on the Idol Alpha is for the pop-out micro-SIM tray. Like the iPhone 6, it needs a tool to open.

We understand what Alcatel OneTouch was going for with the phone’s design, but it doesn’t seem to have married up practical and aesthetic priorities at all well.

Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha – Screen

The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha has a 4.7-inch screen, a size that these days fits among lower mid-range phones rather than more expensive ones. It’s a decent size, and lets the phone stay relatively small and easy to handle. The thin-ness helps, too: it’s a very slender 7.5mm thick.

Resolution of the Alcatel OneTouch Alpha screen is a little disappointing, though. You get 720p, which is fair for the size, but not really for the price. With reams of 1080p phones available at £300, we find the display resolution a little hard to accept.

The effects in use are minor, though. There’s a little more blockiness around the edges of characters, but only a tiny amount. The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha's display is still very sharp.

Colours are fair but not fantastic, with slight over-saturation designed for ‘pop’ rather than accuracy. And, as with most LCDs, the flawed black levels become apparent in darker rooms. We’d have no issue with the display if it wasn’t for the price. Selling at the same price as the Nexus 5, and £50 more than the Honor 6, the Idol Alpha's limitations are actually quite serious. Just ‘fairly good’ doesn’t quite cut it at £300 SIM-free.

Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha – Software

One of the most glaringly out-of-date parts of the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is its software. It runs Android 4.2.2 where Android 5.0 Lollipop has already rolled out to a bunch of phones.

The phone is a full two years behind the pack in this respect. An update may come, but we’d advise not relying on the fact.

It's distressingly outdated if you think about it too much, but the custom UI on the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha does mask it to an extent. Lots of the changes people notice most between Android 4.2 and 5.0 are aesthetic, and would be wiped out or altered by a custom launcher anyway.

This is a fairly light interface, though. It alters the look of the home screens and apps menu, but retains the style of the dropdown notification bar. One of the more significant things you’ll miss out on that’s included in Android 5.0 Lollipop is lock screen notifications. Here you just get an unlock widget that lets you head straight to the camera, dialler or SMS app instead of the homescreens.

As we found in the Alcatel OneTouch Idol 2 Mini, the Idol Alpha has been packed with a few too many apps – particularly games. However, many can be uninstalled if you want to give the phone a spring clean. It seems even more of a shame here than in the Idol 2 Mini S, though, detracting a little from the classy vibe the hardware design tries to portray.

Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha – Performance and Games

Once again, the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is let down by its hardware when you look closely at the processor running the show. It has a quad-core MediaTek MT6589 chipset clocked at 1.2GHz, with 1GB of RAM. This is effectively very similar architecture-wise to the Snapdragon 400 CPU used by the Moto G and many others, but with a PowerVR GPU instead of an Adreno-series one.

Looking at benchmark results, the Idol Alpha is very disappointing for the price. In the Geekbench 3 test it scores 1114 points, roughly on par with what we’d expect from a Snapdragon 400 phone.

Day-to-day performance hits are relatively minor, but we did notice some keyboard lag and some slow-down in things appearing on the home screen at times – especially if, for example, the phone's downloading something in the background at the same time. App load speeds are often quite slow, too, with particular waits for the high-end 3D games we use to test gaming performance.

Getting this sort of hardware for £300 represents poor value for money. Even the LG G3 has been seen at this price, and it offers more than twice the power.

As we saw with the Moto G, gaming performance is acceptable in most titles, but switch them up to max graphical detail – available in some high-end 3D games such as Dead Trigger 2 – and you start to see a performance hit, with less-than-smooth frame rates. While the GPU is powerful enough to mostly cope at the screen’s 720p resolution, we should be getting more for our £300.

The lacking performance isn't just seen in the processor. It also lacks 4G mobile Internet, something that's been expected at this sort of price for a while now. Much like the processor, 3G would be fine if the phone was a lot cheaper. But it isn’t. So it’s not.

Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha – Camera

The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha has a 13-megapixel camera with flash. At almost any price, that's a decent resolution. Sure, it’s topped by the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact and Samsung Galaxy S5, but a great 13-megapixel camera will more-than satisfy.

This is only an OK 13-megapixel camera, not a great one. In the right lighting, you can produce some great shots, but it doesn’t have the chops to maintain image quality in more challenging lighting.

In lower light, images become very noisy, and with mid-level indoors lighting we noticed pretty significant light blooming around light sources, which generally makes images look terrible. We were also disappointed with the Idol Alpha’s rather weak HDR mode.

The poor dynamic range of most phone cameras will introduce either highlight blow-outs to images or make these photos look desperately dull. HDR should be able to fix this, but we found the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha’s HDR just too weak to produce the effects we’re after.

However, this is not a flat-out bad camera. In daylight it can produce some images worth keeping, and while low-light shots are noisy, you can fix them up with a bit of post-processing on a computer. And, if we’re honest, it’s roughly what we expected from the Alcatel OneTouch, which most likely uses one of Sony’s fairly decent image sensors.

We’re pretty happy with the camera app, too, which values simplicity over packing in loads of extra modes and features.

Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha – Battery life

Last time we reviewed an Alcatel OneTouch phone, its battery life was abysmal. That was the Idol 2 Mini S. Thankfully, the Idol Alpha is much, much better, despite having exactly the same battery capacity of 2000mAh and significantly higher screen resolution.

In our usual looping MP4 video test, the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha lasted for 9hrs 10mins, which is the same sort of performance we saw from the original Moto G (superior to the 2014 Moto G).

In daily use you should easily be able to get a day’s use off a charge. As long as you’re not playing games for extended periods or watching lots of streamed video, you should be able to clock in at around a day and a half between trips to the power socket. Just check WhatsApp a few times and you won’t see the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha drain down by more than a few per cent each hour.

Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha – Sound and Call Quality

We’re back down to more of a normal performance with the call and speaker quality. Both are adequate, but nothing special. There’s a secondary microphone for noise cancellation during calls and the earpiece speaker is reasonably clear, but not remarkable.

The main speaker is a mono unit on the back, but it's about as thin and quiet as you'd expect from a phone only 7.5mm thick. It’s not great.

Should I buy the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha?

The Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha is an interesting handset with some eye-catching design motifs. However, start using the phone and begin to assess it within the wider market and it just doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

Most core elements are fine: the camera’s decent enough, the processor is a fair match for the 720p display and the resolution is just about sharp enough for the screen size. However, there are some design blunders that we find hard to accept when the specs are already a stretch given the SIM-free price.

The lack of a headphone jack is unforgivable, we don’t like the soft keys much, there’s no 4G and the software is very old. If you don’t want to use your phone for music at all, and can find the Alcatel OneTouch Idol Alpha at a much lower cost than the standard SIM-free price, this is a perfectly respectable phone with rather good battery life. But we do mean a much lower cost.

Verdict

While solid in most respects, some annoying design decisions and a high price lose the Alpha a recommendation.

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Key Features: Octo-core Kirin 920 CPU; 5-inch Full HD screen; Android 4.4.2 with EmotionUI
Manufacturer: Huawei

What is the Honor 6?

The Honor 6 sees Huawei return to a place it used to thrive: affordable phones. But the definition of an affordable phone has changed in recent years.

Where Huawei’s budget classics were £100 phones, the Honor 6 is a budget 4G £250 alternative to top-end phones such as the Galaxy S5, Xperia Z3 – and even the iPhone 6. There are plenty of quirks to either fix or learn to live with, but the value on offer here is quite excellent.

Huawei Honor 6 – Design

The Huawei Honor 6 looks and feels quite different from the company’s other phones.

Its hardware offers simplicity and and higher-end feel that we don’t often associate with Huawei phones. It’s actually quite similar in looks to the Amazon Fire Phone, but without the nasty complement of cameras on the front.

For those who haven’t checked out Amazon’s disappointing handset in person, the Huawei Honor 6 has completely flat front and back panels that look like glass. Only the front is glass, though.

A layer of Gorilla Glass 3 sits on the screen while the back is shiny ‘faux glass’ plastic. We’ll admit we didn’t really notice that in use, though.

However, after using the phone for a couple of weeks, the Huawei Honor 6 back had earned a couple of light scratches. It will be susceptible to lots more scratches in the long term, so you may want to consider using the protector that comes in the box, or buying a case.

The sides are plastic, too. The Huawei Honor 6 is a deceptively simple mobile, but one that offers enough class to fit in completely among mid-range phones, and even more expensive ones. We’ll admit it: we were fooled, at least at first.

You can get the Huawei Honor 6 in black or white, and both versions appear pretty attractive, although we’ve only tried the black first-hand.

Other than appearing to be made of glass in the vein of the Xperia Z3, the Huawei Honor 6 has nice simple sides, with all its sockets bar the micro-USB charge plug hidden under a plastic flap. Under this you’ll find the Micro-SIM and microSD slots.

On occasion among mid-range phones a memory card slot is used as an excuse to scrimp on internal storage, but the Huawei Honor 6 has a decent 16GB memory.

There are even hardware features not fully exploited in the software at launch. For example, on the top edge of the phone is an IR transmitter, but there’s no remote control app installed to use it.

An IR transmitter lets a phone function as a universal remote, but you need an app that offers the exact commands needed. There are plenty of third-party alternatives, but with current firmware the phone doesn’t seem to make the IR blaster available to other apps. We’ll be deeply disappointed if this isn’t fixed, but with any luck it will. We’re awaiting confirmation on this from Huawei.

The Huawei Honor 6 knows how to pack in the hardware, and initial impressions that the phone is great value never fade or stop. This phone truly is a bit of a bargain.

However, after comparing to some other phones of this size, it's a slight shame that it has such a boxy shape. While the sides of the Honor 6 are slightly rounded, the edges are still fairly severe, and using more of a curvature would have made it easier to handle. We have the same issue with Sony’s top Xperia phones.

Huawei Honor 6 – Screen

One of the clearest signs that the Huawei Honor 6 is a phone to be reckoned with is the spec of its screen. For £250 you get a 5-inch Full HD display. This is one of the first devices we’ve seen to launch at this price with such a high-res screen, and from a big brand, too.

Looking at the Huawei Honor 6 next to the 2014 Motorola Moto G, a cheaper 5-inch phone with a lower-res 720p display, the difference is obvious. At this size, you do need 1080p if you want the pristine sharpness we've come to associate with higher-end phones.

The Honor 6 gets you 440 pixels per inch, which is excellent pixel density that far outstrips the iPhone 6.

It’s an LTPS LCD screen, designed for low power consumption. There’s no mention of IPS architecture from Huawei’s specs, but we noticed zero contrast shift at any angle.

Viewing angles are reasonably good, but with greater loss of brightness than you get in some rival IPS LCD screens. Top brightness is very good and colours are vivid. Those with particularly picky eyes will note that the Honor 6's colours are marginally oversaturated, but not as distractingly as the recent Motorola Moto X. They’re larger than life, but not offensive to the eye.

The Huawei Honor 6 lets you tweak the colour temperature of the display, making it warmer or cooler. This doesn’t alter saturation, but warming up the display can make it appear more ‘relaxed’ if you find the colour a bit intense. The default setting is a little blueish, so we recommend having a tweak.

Aside from the slight oversaturation, the only other issue is the black level limitation that’s common to all LCDs, but a bit worse than the high-end average here. In lower lighting, the Honor 6’s black areas look quite blueish, which will become obvious if you like watching a bit of TV before bed. Some LCD phones offer better black levels, like the Sony Xperia Z3 and LG G3, but it’s not something you’ll notice in normal day-to-day use.

As long as you don’t mind the approach to colour, we can’t imagine many taking issue with the Huawei Honor 6's screen. It also has a pretty good auto-brightness feature.

Not only can you make the phone alter backlight intensity depending on ambient light conditions; you can also set the relative level using a simple slider in the drop-down notifications menu. Other phones often revert to manual brightness as soon as you touch the slider.

One obvious question, though, is how does the Honor 6 compare to the Nexus 5 and OnePlus One? Those are the two main lower-cost 1080p phone competition.

The Honor 6 has far more vibrant colour than the OnePlus One, and the Nexus 5 appears to be the best of the three for colour accuracy. However, crucially, the Huawei is in the same league as these big players.

Huawei Honor 6 – Software, Apps and Themes

The Huawei Honor 6 runs Android 4.4.2 with the new version of the custom EmotionUI that we saw in the Huawei Ascend Mate 7. We’ve had huge issues with Huawei’s custom interface in the past, and while the quirkiness is still there, the latest version is a lot better than the versions of old.

First, we’ll deal with why the EmotionUI is so unusual.

It tries to infuse a bit of iOS into Android by getting rid of the apps menu. Everything on your Honor 6 has to have a place on your homescreens, so if you like to keep your phone relatively organised you’ll have to find a place for every app and game you install.

Upon installation, they’ll just find a spot wherever they can, so you’ll need to take care to ensure it doesn’t become a mess. However it does at least support folders, giving you the tools you need to keep your phone in shape.

EmotionUI is also one of the last remaining interfaces to really embrace themes, which were much more popular in the days before Android.

In previous Huawei phones, themes were pretty poor. Most pre-installed ones were duds and you couldn’t easily download additional ones. The Huawei Honor 6 fixes both of these points.

You get three pretty attractive, simple themes pre-installed, and you can download dozens more directly from the phone. Some are a bit ridiculous – there’s even a US pop-art themed one – but we’re pretty confident most tastes will be catered for. Additional themes are free to download, too.

The Huawei Honor 6 is pretty quirk-overloaded, though. The odd layout and obsession with themes are one thing, but there are also things to fix in areas such as the ringtones and the use of images in the lock screen.

As standard, our Honor 6 played a 30-second-long piece of classical music whenever we got a WhatsApp message and displayed random images on the ‘magazine’ lock screen, including one particularly odd pic of a baby’s feet. There’s some de-weird-ification to do that we simply had to put down to differences between the Western and Chinese markets – the Honor brand has traditionally been trotted out over there.

Either that or someone high up at Huawei has strange tastes. All of these elements can be fixed, of course, but to start with the Honor 6 may feel a little alien.

There are a few things to change or get used to, but in other respects EmotionUI is a pretty feature-complete, inoffensive interface. It doesn’t bombard you with features, and offers favourites such as brightness and feature toggles in the drop-down notifications menu.  

Huawei Honor 6 – Apps

Aside from offering the Themes app and a few basic utilities like a file manager, a Huawei customer service app, FM radio and a torch, there aren’t all that many Huawei apps added to the phone as standard. That’s a very good thing given the way the Honor 6 arranges its apps.

However, there’s another dated element to the apps roster — the phone includes a bunch of preinstalled Gameloft games. We imagine this deal was put in place when Huawei was showing off its Kirin 920 processor for the first time, but this sort of move feels a little dated and unnecessary in 2014. Still, you can delete them so no major harm is done.

Huawei Honor 6 – Games and Performance

Previously we’ve complained about performance in Huawei phones, but the Honor 6 has no real issues. There’s barely any lag and we didn't experience a single crash during our fairly extended test period.

Our guess is that Huawei took on board complaints about the performance of some of its old phones, because it's packed a whopping 3GB of RAM into the Honor 6. That’s unheard of in a £250 phone and probably has a lot to do with the handset’s great performance.

The CPU is also unusual: the HiSilicon Kirin 920 CPU. This is a Huawei-made chipset, in case you’re wondering why it doesn’t use a more common processor from the Qualcomm Snapdragon range or MediaTek.

In previous high-end Huawei phones we’ve found that the Kirin chips don’t quite match up to the Qualcomm alternatives, but at £250 the Honor 6 even goes head to head with some Snapdragon 400 devices. And let’s be clear: the Kirin 920 decimates the Snapdragon 400.

The processor uses four 1.7GHz Cortex-A15 cores and four 1.3GHz Cortex-A7 cores. Even its ‘rubbish’ cores are theoretically faster than the Snapdragon 400’s ones.

This architecture uses the lesser cores for low-intensity tasks, with the others kicking in when needed.

In the Geekbench 3 benchmarking tool, the Honor 6 scores 3080 points. That is frankly an amazing score for a phone that's so cheap, and more than double the result of the LG G3 S, which sells at a similar price. It even outclasses Snapdragon 801 devices such as the Galaxy S5.

This kind of performance makes the Honor 6 among the best affordable gaming phones in the world. A 1080p screen with enough juice to avoid scrimping on textures and lighting effects for half the price of the competition? It’s an incredibly attractive combo.

The GPU used by the phone is the Mali-T628 MP4, whose performance is just a little less than the Adreno 330 seen in the most popular top-end phones of the moment.

Huawei Honor 6 – Camera

The Huawei Honor 6 offers a 13-megapixel camera on its back and a 5-megapixel one on the front. With a dual-LED flash alongside the main rear camera, it seems like this phone has it all.

However, it’s in the imaging department that actually find some of the Huawei Honor 6’s most serious issues. The hardware specs seem great for the price – for any price, really – but the results are disappointing in some conditions.

First, the autofocus is quite spotty and unreliable. We found it struggles very badly with night shooting, at times simply refusing to focus, even if there should really be enough light to work with. It also struggles with close-ups, taking quite a long time to lock on.

The result is a camera that can feel like a doddering old geriatric — not the sort of experience you may be expecting from a phone with as much high-end tech as this.

The speed issue isn't constant, though. When you’re shooting normal daylight photos, there’s very little shutter lag. And you can even take a photo from standby, just by double-tapping the volume-down button. It takes 1-1.5 seconds in total. Not bad.

If this inconsistency is down to software, Huawei should be able to fix these issues. But if it’s partly down to the image signal processor in the Kirin 920, we may have to make do.

The Honor 6's image quality varies a lot depending on the lighting conditions. In daylight, you’ll get very good detail, with the f/2.0 lens able to have a reasonable stab at making the most of the fairly high 13-megapixel resolution. For all the issues we have, the Honor 6 can reap noticeably more detail than an 8-megapixel camera in daylight.

Purple fringing around areas off high-contrast fine detail is only slight, too, and much less so than something like the HTC One M8. Really pixel-peeping, these fine details can look a little fizzy, but it’s not nothing to worry about unless you’re going to do significant cropping post-shoot.

When challenged with greater light variance in a scene, the Huawei Honor 6 seems to favour overexposing the sky rather than making the whole shot look dull. Blown highlights may make real photographers cringe, but it’s the right choice in the largely throwaway world of mobile phone shooting, and exposure was an occasional issue, not a constant companion. Could metering be more intelligent? Yes, and dynamic range isn't wonderful, but it’s not too bad in daylight.

Where the metering system really fails is in low lighting. It completely refuses to brighten up a scene when there’s not much light to work with. As well as resulting in very poor low-light or night detail in general, we found that autofocus performance was very bad indeed in darker settings. It’s as if the camera just isn’t geared up to work in these sorts of conditions at all.

Thankfully, the dual-LED flash is pretty powerful, meaning you can still get those late-night party group shots without ending up with a dark smudge. This low-light performance needs to be improved, though, as it’s a real downside for the phone.

The HDR mode could be improved, too. It’s reasonably effective, but in some conditions it doesn’t manage to weed out overexposure, which is one of the main goals of HDR, along with revealing more shadow detail.

The Honor 6’s camera app is very similar to that of the Huawei Ascend P7, its more expensive cousin. The layout is fairly simple, but you get plenty of extras in a separate modes menu.

As well as filters, panorama and HDR, you get a wrinkle-busting Beauty mode, a best photo burst-mode, watermark and All-focus. The latter takes shots at a bunch of different focus points, then lets you pick which part of the photo is in focus afterwards. It's mercifully quick, but we can’t imagine many people using it all that frequently.

The front camera has a very high-resolution 5-megapixel sensor, like several phones from Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers. Selfies have become important in the West, but doubly so elsewhere.

You can certainly take good selfies with the Honor 6, and it handily offers a little box you’re meant to look into to avoid looking like you’re staring into the middle-distance. However, as it uses a pretty tiny sensor, the extra resolution is only going to result in notably greater detail if you have decent lighting to work with.

Video capture tops out at 1080p rather than 4K. While the phone should in theory have the performance to capture in 4K, it's not a great loss given the Honor 6's price.

Huawei Honor 6 – Battery Life

The Huawei Honor 6 has a huge 3100mAh battery, the same size used by the Sony Xperia Z3, even though this phone has a smaller screen.

With light use you can get two days out of the Huawei Honor 6, but if you want to do some browsing or video viewing, you’re looking rather at a solid day and a half before needing a charge. It’s a very strong performance, but ultimately one that might disappoint if you’re expecting the world on a stick after seeing the battery specs.

Our assumption is that, as we’ve found previously, the Honor 6’s Kirin 920 processor isn’t quite as efficient as the Snapdragon 800/801/805 we see more frequently. Our battery tests show that this phone tends to use a bit more power when left unused than some of those top performers, but it’s still certainly smart and efficient enough to last for days and days (and days) should you leave it on a table fully charged but unused.

In our video playback test, which involves playing a 720p MP4 file on loop from 100 per cent battery, with the screen on mid brightness, until the device dies, the Honor 6 lasted for 11 hours and 30 minutes. It’s a very strong result but, again, not quite as good as you might get from a 5-inch 3100mAh phone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU.

The Kirin 920 may be powerful, but it doesn’t seem to be quite as smart in the finer points of power management. For example, in the standard Smart power mode it’s very strict about apps getting access to CPU time when they’re not being used, but it doesn’t offer the sort of power savings you might get in Samsung or Sony phone doing the same.

There is another much more aggressive power-saving mode if you really do need to keep the Honor 6 lasting as long as possible, though. Ultra Power Saving mode changes the UI to only give you access to basic phone features such as the dialler, messaging and your contacts book. It takes the ‘smart’ out of your smartphone, basically.

It’ll make your Honor 6 last longer, but you wouldn’t want to use it apart from in an emergency.

Huawei Honor 6 – Call and Sound Quality

Little deficiencies in the technical attention to detail in the Honor 6 aren’t really down to the people who actually designed the phone – we imagine the HiSilicon team has virtually nothing to do with the folk behind the Honor 6. However, there are other little issues in the phone’s sound quality.

Both the internal speaker and the earpiece speaker suffer from audio clipping. This causes popping noises in the audio output, a form of distortion. It seems to be down to the audio levels in the phone simply being a bit off, and isn't driver distortion – it’s a lot less offensive-sounding than that, and only really becomes an annoyance in phone calls.

We hope this will be solved in a software update.

Aside from the audio pops, sound quality in both the call and internal speaker is reasonable, but not remarkable. The main speaker is a mono unit that sits on the back of the Honor 6.

The top volume is fair, but the tone is a little thin, like most mobile phone speakers. It’s also hard to ignore the several lower-cost phones that offer stereo speakers these days, like the 2014 Moto G (although its sound quality is no better).

Should I buy the Huawei Honor 6?

The Huawei Honor 6 is a high-value, aggressive phone of the kind we thought had disappeared from Huawei’s ranks. It beats all the big-name competition.

However, if you’re willing to shop around there are a few very good alternatives to consider. The LG G2 costs around £40 more and is a bit less quirky than the Honor 6, while the Nexus 5 is just £20 more and is entirely quirk-free.

The Honor 6 offers benefits other than just price, though. Battery life is significantly better than the Nexus 5's, and it has the microSD card support that the Nexus phone lacks. We think the LG G2 is perhaps a better choice, but the simple truth is that both are solid, great-value phones.

Verdict

The Huawei Honor 6 is a quirky phone, but one that also offers top value.

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Making a bargain tablet better

The Tesco Hudl 2 is one of the top tech bargains, a high-spec Android tablet that offers more gadget for your money than just about anything else.

However, there are plenty of ways to improve your Hudl 2, plenty of tweaks to apply. From getting rid of the Tesco bloatware on it to making the best use of its pre-loaded features, we’re going to expose some of our favourite Hudl 2 tips, tricks and secrets.

Get yourself a tea, a charger for your tablet and a freshly sharpened finger ready to work that touchscreen.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - De-Tesco your Hudl 2 with Google Now

The one thing many people want to do when they first get a Tesco Hudl 2 is to remove as much of the Tesco rubbish pre-installed on the thing as they can. We’ll give Tesco credit for making a high-end tablet like this so cheap that it can’t possibly be making much, if any, money from the hardware. However, that doesn’t stop us wanting to remove all the pre-installed bloatware on there.

You can’t uninstall the existing apps – not easily, at least – but you can get rid of the extra elements of Tesco-ness by installing the Google Now Launcher. This was the interface seen in the Nexus 5 before it got the update to Android 5.0. You’ll find the app in Google Play.

Once installed, a Home submenu will appear in Settings that lets you choose which launcher to use. Alternatively, you’ll be prompted the first time you press the Home button after installing. It’s a little software tweak with all the power of a hack, but without any of the risk.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Custom launchers that let you completely de-Tesco the tablet

Looks and feel-wise, Google Now is probably our favourite Android interface. However, there are plenty of other launchers available from Google Play, and some give you much more control over how Tesco-infused the Hudl 2 is.

To really clean up its act, you need to find a custom interface that lets you hide all the pre-installed Tesco apps, or put them in folders. For the purpose of this tip, we used Apex Launcher, one of our favourite picks from our best Android launcher apps feature.

With the Apex Launcher installed and running, just as we did with the Google Now one earlier, press the three-pip icon at the very top-right of the apps menu. Then select Drawer Settings and Hidden apps. You’ll see a big list of every app installed on your Tesco Hudl 2, and you can tap them to make them disappear from your apps screen.

You can make it as though it’s not a Tesco tablet at all with Apex, and the look isn’t too far off the Google Now style, either.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Cleaning up your home screens

Don’t fancy using a custom interface? Well, the standard My Tesco one doesn’t let you alter the apps menu at all. However, it’s still worth tweaking the home screens as much as you can.

Tesco packs the Hudl’s home screens with gumpf, but you don’t need to leave any of it there.

To remove elements from the home screen, just hold a finger down on an icon or widget until a cross appears at the top of the screen. Drag the icon or widget onto this cross to remove it.

To add an app icon to the homescreen, just hold a finger down on the one you want in the apps menu until the screen changes to display the home screen’s contents, then drop it in. Alternatively, to add widgets hold a finger down on an empty part of a home screen until the wallpapers and widgets menu appears. Then just tap Widgets to be taken to the roster of installed widgets.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - How to output your Hudl screen to a TV

The Tesco Hudl is one of the few budget tablets to offer a video output. Plenty offer wireless video streaming, but the Tesco Hudl 2 has a good old-fashioned hardware socket.

The only problem: you don’t get a cable in the box, so you need to buy one yourself.

It’s a Micro HDMI socket, so to plug one into your tablet you’ll need a Micro HDMI-to-HDMI cable. You’ll find one online for a few pounds, or most likely for about £25 on the high street. Tesco offers its own £15 ‘official’ Hudl video output cable, but it’s not readily available at the time of writing. There’ll be no real difference between this and one from somewhere else. On this occasion, you can buy cheap.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Unlocking Hudl 2 with your face

Like most Andorid devices, the Tesco Hudl 2 offers plenty of little security measures. The one worth showing off is Face Unlock.

What this does is to scan and memorise the geometry of your face so that it knows when you’re in front of the tablet, using the front camera to check when you use the device.

You’ll find it in Settings > Security > Screen Lock. Follow the on-screen prompts and the Tesco Hudl 2 will scan your face, then ask you for a PIN or password if the scan doesn't work for whatever reason.

We should say, though, that Face Unlock isn't a very good security measure. A picture of your face could be used, as could the face of someone with a similar facial structure. If you don’t need ‘proper’ security, it’s neat, though.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Get extra free apps for your Hudl 2

If you want to get as many free apps and games as you can get your hands on, you shouldn’t just rely on Google Play. It offers frequent freebies, but you can get some great extras from Amazon’s Appstore, too.

This is the alternative app store you’ll find on Kindle tablet devices. While we’d rather use Google Play out of the two, Amazon doesn’t half get you some good ‘free app of the day’ deals.

You can’t get the Amazon Appstore from Google Play, though. Instead, download it from the Amazon website.

You’ll need to enable third-party app installation – an option in Settings > Security – but when using it apps will install very similarly to Google Play downloads. Amazon Appstore has a reasonably rigorous submissions procedure, so you needn’t worry about malware when downloading from it.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Encrypt your tablet for ultra security

If you’re going to keep highly sensitive data on your Tesco Hudl 2, it’s worth considering encrypting the device. This is actually something that Google is doing as standard with phones and tablets shipping with Android 5.0, like the Nexus 6, so it’s not just a measure for super-paranoid people.

What it means is that, without having the right passcode or password to unlock the tablet, no one will be able to access your data, even if it’s pulled directly out of the tablet’s memory banks. It’s secure.

Of course, this also means you have to use a passcode or PIN every time you put the tablet into standby, which can get annoying. You may also want to consider a special password-secured app that keeps certain secure data itself. There are plenty on Google Play.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Creating profiles for the whole family

As one of the ultimate ‘family’ tablets, it’s predictable that the Tesco Hudl 2 supports multiple user profiles. You can make one for each member of the family.

There are two main types: those with access to whatever content they like, and restricted profiles with limited access. Profiles for kids, in other words.

You’ll find the option to create a new profile in Settings > Users. The process will ask you to choose whether the profile is limited or a full ‘adult’ one. You'll need a Google account to set up a full profile, though.

Once set up, you’ll see the profiles you can pick from the lock screen, each of which can be password protected to keep each person’s content secure.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Use the Auto Brightness setting

When we first got our Hudl 2 out of the box, it was set to use a standard screen brightness. However, one of the neat hardware extras of the tablet is an ambient brightness sensor that can judge outside light conditions and change the backlight intensity accordingly. It’ll generally help you save battery, too, by dimming the screen when it’s darker.

To turn Auto Brightness on, pull down from the right-hand side of the screen to bring down the features menu. One of the entries will be Brightness.

Tap on it and the Brightness slider will appear. To the left of it will be an Auto button that turns the setting on and off.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Uninstalling apps and troubleshooting problems

We have bad news for those of you who want to clean up your Tesco Hudl 2. You can’t simply uninstall the apps that come bundled on the tablet. They’re there for good unless you root the device – it’s a form of hacking.

If you want to uninstall the apps you’ve installed yourself, though, just hold a finger down on their entry in the apps menu. After a second or so the screen will change to show the layout of your home screens. It’s here you can put app shortcuts on your home screens, but it's also how you uninstall apps. Just drag the app up to the uninstall entry at the top of the screen.

Uninstalling apps is a good way to solve any problems you might have. Battery issues in particular are often caused by apps not doing what they should.

However, if you’re having real trouble with the Hudl 2, before sending it back to Tesco we recommend giving it a factory reset. After having backed-up any data or pics you don’t want to lose, go to Settings > Backup & Reset and select Factory Data Reset. In here is a Reset Tablet option that’ll get rid of everything on the device and make it the same as brand new.

If that doesn’t fix your woes, there’s a deeper hardware problem at the root.

Tesco Hudl 2 tips and tricks - Check out the Android Easter egg

Every version of Android features an Easter egg, a little hidden treat for the enthusiasts out there. At the time of writing the Tesco Hudl 2 runs Android 4.4.2. This means you get the KitKat Easter egg, which features a strange interactive landscape of tiles with icons from the former versions of the system — Cupcake, Jelly Bean and so on.

To access the Easter egg, go to Settings and scroll down to the About Tablet entry.

Head into it, then repeatedly tap on Android Version. After just a few taps, the Easter egg will start. Enjoy.

Read the full Tesco Huld 2 review

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Key Features: 6-inch 1,920 x 1,080 pixel IPS screen; HiSilicon Kirin 925 CPU; 13-megapixel main camera with LED flash
Manufacturer: Huawei

What is the Huawei Ascend Mate 7?

The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 is a very large phone, one whose display is close to tablet-like proportions. Gamers and those who like to watch videos on the way to work should have an instant interest in such a phone.

And, contrary to what the name suggests, it’s definitely phone-sized: the screen is six inches across, not seven.

As is so often the case with Huawei phones, you need to fiddle with the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 to iron out a few weird tweaks that have been applied. But with a little effort, this is one of the best large-screen phones money can buy. At £400, it’s a good lower-cost alternative to the Samsung Galaxy Note 4.

Huawei Ascend Mate 7: Design

Huawei is not a master of design. Often its inspirations are all-too apparent, and the original motifs it devises tend to be a little wonky. But it’s getting better, and the Mate 7 is certainly one of the best Huawei phones yet.

The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 has a look very similar to the HTC One Max. It’s imposing, mostly metal and has a fingerprint scanner on the back. A paragon of simplicity it is not.

However, aside from a slight lack of originality the design is remarkably good. Here’s the important bit – for a 6-inch screen phone, it’s very easy to use.

A handful of clever choices ensure this, and while not exactly a surprise, it is a relief after the Huawei Ascend P7, which seemed to value being thin over being enjoyable to use day-to-day. That phone missed the point. This one gets it, or at least seems to.

The first important bit is that the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 is clearly as much all-screen as the company could manage. Bezels are super-thin and there’s very little expanse above or below the display. 

For empirical evidence – the Mate 7 is just 0.5mm wider than the 5.5-inch Samsung Galaxy Note 2. Granted, you’ll find much greater differences compared to phones of 2014 such as the LG G3, but clear effort has been put into making the phone as manageable as possible.

It’s not just the width, but the height too. This phone is thinner, shorter and less wide than its predecessor the Ascend Mate 2.

To make this possible, the soft keys are built into the software, and despite the current trend for front speakers, the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 keeps its one on the rear to ensure it doesn’t add more bulk. The result is a phone that's 7.5mm less tall than the HTC One Max, a phone we found to be flat-out too big at the time.

The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 is big, but not too big. Now that phones are that bit thinner, bezels that bit smaller, we’re at last finding 6-inch phones that we don’t wish we could shrink down.

Huawei has also put the soft keys towards the centre of the screen to make them easier to reach, and it works. Obviously, the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 remains a handful, but this is among the most accessible 6-inch phones to date.

It also feels good. About 85 per cent of the back is anodised aluminium, with just a couple of plastic bungs on the end to house the antennas, which would have trouble transmitting through metal. Build quality isn’t quite Apple-grade on closer inspection – in our sample the ‘volume up’ key lost its clickiness after a few days of use, but we assume this is an unfortunate fault with our sample (it is labelled an Engineering Sample, so this seems likely).

Much like the soft keys, the power button is placed within reach of your digit (right thumb in this case), and the phone’s super-slim 7.9mm body adds to how breezy this phone feels to use. Yes, we’ve complained about Huawei’s obsession with slimness in the past, but in a 6-inch phone, cuts to every dimension are appreciated.

Huawei Ascend Mate 7: Fingerprint scanner

After first noticing the similarities with the HTC One Max, we were worried about the Huawei Ascend Mate 7’s fingerprint scanner. The HTC’s was so particular it became a nightmare to use.

In another unexpected win for Huawei, the Mate 7’s fingerprint scanner is, as of October 2014, the best you’ll find in a phone outside of the Apple Touch ID sensor. It’s miles better than HTC’s fingerprint scanner and far better than the Samsung one used in phones like the Note 4 and Galaxy S5.

First, the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 does not make you move a finger over the scanner, just place it on there. And it scans your entire fingerprint when calibrating, rather than just the central part.

As such it’s able to be much more forgiving of fingerprints placed at an angle or non-centrally. I still experienced plenty of ‘non-recognised fingerprint’ messages, but it automatically rescans without any extra interaction required within a fraction of a second. It easily achieves the main fingerprint scanner goal of outpacing a typed-in passcode, which the HTC One Max and Samsung Galaxy S5 fail at, in our experience.

The scanner also sits in just about the perfect position for your forefinger, and is recessed by a full millimetre or so, making blind operation a doddle. It works without getting near the power button too. Huawei rarely shows the big players of Android how things are done, but it certainly has with the Ascend Mate 7’s fingerprint scanner.

Other less interesting aspects of the phone still worth noting include that it uses dual pop-out trays for microSIM and microSD cards on the left edge. You get a reasonable 16GB of storage in the phone, but a memory card slot boosts up its media cred several notches. 

Huawei Ascend Mate 7: Screen

The lead attraction of the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 is its screen. More specifically, its screen size.

While the screens of ‘standard’ high-end phones have teetered over the 5-inch mark, the Huawei Ascend Mate 7’s 6-inch model still seems huge.

This is also the first Mate-series phone to really impress with its screen quality as well as size. Previous Mate models used 720p resolution displays, but the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 has a Full HD one.

While this resolution has been surpassed by a small handful of phones including the LG G3, the 368ppi pixel density this affords the Huawei Ascend Mate is easily enough to appear very sharp indeed.

The IPS LCD screen type used here gives a fairly similar screen character to LG’s best too. You get pretty decent colour accuracy, enough to convince the eye if not a professional colour calibration tool. There’s some control over the colour too. You can choose how warm or cool it looks using an easy slider in the Settings menu, giving the display a yellower (warm) or bluer (cool) character.

Viewing angles are great as well, with more-than-acceptable brightness loss from an off-angle perspective. There’s a bit of backlight bleed in the top millimetre of the screen, which may be a result of cutting down the area above the screen, but it’s minor and not too distracting.

The potential elephant in the room here is the Galaxy Note 4. Its display offers better blacks and far greater pixel density thanks to its QHD-resolution panel. We also expect it to bring slightly better colour accuracy in the right mode. But with an RRP £230 higher, these comparisons breeze past the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 without denting our opinion of it.

It is a fantastic canvas for games and video, better than 5-inch phones by virtue of its size. An extra inch may not sound like a lot on paper, but it’s a big difference in person.

We can’t give this praise without emphasising that we’re happy to dole it out because the phone hardware isn’t a pain in the backside to use, unlike so many earlier giant-screen phones. Finally, 6-inch phones are starting to make sense.

Huawei supplies the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 with a plastic screen protector attached, one that’s guaranteed to be bubble-free unlike the one you might try to apply yourself. It’s rather good as it doesn’t have the mottling effect so many screen protectors can burden your phone with. But it’s arguably a bit unnecessary.

The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 uses Gorilla Glass 3, the same scratch-resistant layer used in many (or even most) high-end phones. It’s less likely to get scratched than the phone’s aluminium back.

As the protector appears to cause zero image quality compromise, you might as well leave it on until it starts looking tatty. We’d given it a few little nicks within a week, mind.

Add fairly good outdoors visibility to the Huawei Ascend Mate 7’s good image quality and you have a great little media phone. One of the best at the price.

Huawei Ascend Mate 7: Speaker

Speaker quality is also surprisingly decent given the phone only has a single mono speaker outlet on the back. It tries much more than most to provide a bit of mid-range body, avoiding the quite reedy sound that often comes out of single-speaker phones.

We put the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 up against the Samsung Galaxy S5, which has a similar single, rear-mounted speaker and found Huawei’s phone to be beefier-sounding, less tinny and better-equipped to deal with ambient noise.

A good deal of this seems to be down to Digital Sound Processing (DSP). There’s clear evidence of compression in quieter bits of audio – to be clear we’re talking about a ‘studio’ compression effect, not the kind of compression that turns a CD into a 64kbps MP3. It’s can be used to alter the perception of loudness of audio to good effect, especially when dealing with cruddy speaker drivers, as it is here.

It’s loud enough, but the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 falls down a bit when you switch it to silent mode. The vibrate function is unusually weak, meaning you’ll need to manually check your phone to ensure you don’t miss anything if you turn the volume down.

Huawei Ascend Mate 7 – Software and apps

If you’ve read the earlier parts of this Huawei Ascend Mate 7 review, it’ll sound like we’re onto a winner. However, that’s not the impression you get when first booting up the phone.

Its default interface is dreadful, possibly the worst we’ve seen from a ‘known’ phone maker. Its incredibly tacky-looking, decked out in gold ‘bling’ icons and wallpapers. Software is frequently the worst element of Huawei’s phones, and at least to begin with it is here.

The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 uses Emotion UI, the custom Android interface seen in most other Huawei phones. It’s one of our least-favourite custom takes on Android because it alters a lot in 'normal' Android, but generally doesn’t demonstrate good taste in doing so.

The default UI is a prime example.

However, finally Huawei has got off its backside and properly implemented its themes system for a Western audience. Emotion UI has supported themes for years, but in the phones we’ve seen you’ve only had direct access to a few inbuilt ones, needing to scout out others from an obscure Chinese (and Chinese-language) web portal.

In the Huawei Ascend Mate 7, the ability to download new ones has finally been properly integrated. You have access to loads, and the majority are better than that which the phone uses by default. Wonders never cease etc.

These themes alter the wallpaper, the icon style and the Huawei Ascend Mate 7’s lock screen, changing its personality quite radically at times. There’s plenty of fiddling to do if you fancy. Within a few minutes we found a nice and simple one.

However, all of them get rid of the separate apps menu you normally see in Android. Everything app and game you download has to be arranged on your homescreens, demanding a bit more active curation than most other phones.

We’ve complained about this style many times in the past, and it remains contentious. However, it’s not as bad in a 6-inch phone like the Huawei Ascend Mate 7.

25 icons fit comfortably on each homescreen, meaning everyone should be able to fit their daily-use apps within a homescreen or two. The phone also supports folders, further cutting down how much you have to juggle homescreens. 

Huawei Ascend Mate 7 – Performance

The biggest point to note, though, is that the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 does not suffer from the frequent performance glitches we see in the Huawei Ascend P7.

It really is quite nippy, something we’ve not been able to say about recent Huawei flagships.

We hope that part of this is down to improved optimisation in the often-faulty Emotion UI, but the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 also has a seriously fast processor. It’s a HiSilicon chip, produced by a Huawei subsidiary.

The HiSilicon chips we’ve seen to date have routinely underperformed next to Qualcomm Snapdragon rivals, but the Kirin 925 chip here is arguably competing with the Snapdragon 805 – which we’re yet to experience in a phone, as of October 2014.

The Hisilicon Kirin 925 has four Cortex-A15 performance cores clocked at 1.8GHz and four Cortex-A7 cores at 1.3GHz. In true Hisilicon fashion, this is not a particularly up-to-date setup. The Exynos version of the Galaxy Note 4 uses a similar setup but with the newer A53/57 64-bit cores.

In six months, the Hisilicon Kirin 925 is going to be looking quite musty, but for the moment it offers very compelling performance. For example, in the Geekbench benchmark the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 scores 3285. That compares favourably with the Snapdragon 805 and Snapdragon 801 scores we’ve seen – the Snapdragon 801 Galaxy S5 scored 2843 when tested concurrently.

It has loads of power, especially when you consider it’s significantly cheaper than the smaller-screen flagships from the biggest names. It's roughly on-par with what we expect to see from upcoming Snapdragon 805 phones.

If there is going to be a 64-bit Android app revolution, the Ascend Mate 7 won’t really be part of it (it's a 32-bit CPU), but to be honest it probably won’t kick in until this phone is starting to look very old anyway.

Native 64-bit support is only coming to Android with Android L. The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 uses Android 4.4.2 at present.

Huawei Ascend Mate 7 – Apps and Games

The GPU used by the phone is the Mali T-628 MP6, the same GPU used in the Exynos version of the Galaxy Note 3. AnTuTu reported the GPU as a much weaker Mali T-624, but results suggest this is a mis-reporting. Despite the high benchmark scores, the Mali T-628 is actually a bit less powerful than the Adreno 330 used in the Snapdragon equivalents.

Just as important as raw power is the extra ultra low power chip that monitors the phone's sensors while the screen is off. It's this chip that means you can use the fingerprint scanner without turning on the phone, without causing serious battery drain. Of couse, lots of power comes in handy when gaming too.

We’ve been gaming even more than usual with this phone – that screen positively wills you to – and have found that the Ascend Mate 7 has enough power to tackle top-end 3D games. Ramping Dead Trigger 3 up to it highest graphical setting still brings good performance (the game now offers a user-selected graphics setting).

The real big-hitting benefit for gaming, though, is the screen. A good 6-inch display is much more involving for the sorts of games that can feel a little cramped on a 4.5-inch display. It also gives your thumbs much more room to move without cramping the screen in games that use virtual sticks.

In a slightly old-fashioned move, Huawei has teamed-up with Gameloft and pre-installed five of its games on the Huawei Ascend Mate 7. However, you’re not really getting something for nothing – they are either demos or free games anyway, often requiring extra assets to be downloaded.

A few essential apps come pre-loaded too, things like Facebook and Twitter. However, aside from a bunch of little utilities apps there’s not much bloat.

You get things like an FM radio, a ‘mirror’ app and a magnifier, which uses the rear camera set to close-up focus in order to work as a sort of digital magnifying glass. The quirkier bits are automatically filed away into a Tools folder, though.

Huawei Ascend Mate 7 – Camera

The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 has a 13-megapixel camera main camera with a chunky LED flash.

It’s a pretty good setup that’ll do the job for day-to-day photography out on the street. You get pretty good levels of detail in sunlight and even in darker conditions – despite lacking HDR, the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 manages to hold onto detail fairly well in lower-light conditions.

While there’s clear processing/sharpening going on at pixel level and the edges of the frame get a bit scrappy-looking, you can get great levels of fine detail in the right conditions.

However, it’s not perfect. We did notice that in tricky higher-light conditions, the Huawei Ascend Mate 7’s photos can end up looking quite desaturated – almost monochrome in the worst cases.

While things like this are common in phone cameras, we’ve come to rely on HDR modes a bit to patch them up. The Huawei Ascend Mate 7’s is far from the most effective we’ve seen, though. It’s not the go-to fix-all it is in the best examples.

This phone is a middleweight contender in the phone camera world, but when the Huawei Ascend Mate 7’s camera is far from its star feature, that’s not a bad result.

Huawei has kept the modes on offer fairly simple too. You get Panorama, Beauty mode (which de-wrinkles your crows’ feet), HDR, burst mode and Watermark. There aren’t too many crazy processing filters, as you get in Sony’s phones.

It has a go at the post-focus modes attempted by other phones at present too, and this gets a spot as one of the main camera modes – right on the front page. However, as is generally the case with this kind of shooting, you’re much better off just taking normal photos in the vast majority of cases.

On the front is a much better-than-average 5-megapixel camera. With good light you'll get loads of detail in your selfies. However, for low-light indoors shots, that the camera uses a pretty tiny sensor is very evident – the noise is much clearer than in a high-grade 2-megapixel selfie cam.

Huawei Ascend Mate 7 – Battery Life

The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 has a gigantic 4,100mAh battery. For some extra context, the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 ‘only’ has a 3,220mAh unit.

As you’d hope from a unit of this size, the Huawei Ascend Mate 7’s stamina is very good. You don’t need to be terribly careful to get two days’ use out of the phone, and for a spot of purely anecdotal evidence, the battery was at around 50 per cent at 11:30pm on one night, which got me through to about 5:30pm the next day before needing a charge – with some web browsing in-between too.

It does seem as though Huawei has taken a rather ‘brute force’ approach to the Huawei Ascend Mate 7’s battery efficiency, probably because the HiSilicon Kirin 925 isn’t all that power-efficient by itself compared to the best from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon range.

For example, you actually have to specify apps that can run when the screen’s turned off. Everything else will be blocked. This may become a problem for those not intending to take a diploma course in how to use the phone’s settings menu, as it’ll limit what apps will be able to ping you push notifications.

Our standard video test supports this too. You'll get 12 hours of 720p MP4 video playback off a charge, with the backlight set to mid-level.

That's a great result, but not the sort of earth-shattering one you might expect of a phone with such a giant battery. We got more out of the Sony Xperia Z2, for example.

Huawei Ascend Mate 7 – Call Quality and Connectivity

The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 HiSilicon Kirin 925 processor may need some concessions to bring great battery life, but the phone's core hardware otherwise covers most of the connectivity basics we expect from a £400 phone.

You get 4G, with wide-spanning support for the UK’s networks. In the OnePlus One (also Chinese), band 800 support was missing, but it is here, ensuring you can get 4G from all the main networks. It’s Cat 6-compliant too, meaning it can handle speeds of 300Mbps.

NFC is here too, along with the standards of Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and Wi-Fi Direct. There are a couple of missing bits, though. Wi-Fi support only goes up to N standard, not AC, and there’s no IR transmitter.

What is NFC, and why is it in your phone?

This means those who rely on ac to get Wi-FI coverage in the further reaches of their lofty mansions (or those with poor quality routers), may notice patchy Wi-Fi, and you can’t use the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 as a universal remote.

Should I buy the Huawei Ascend Mate 7?

The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 is one of the first phones we’ve tested that justifies having a giant 6-inch screen. It’s not that the software offers extra functionality to make those extra inches work – it’s not Galaxy Note 4-grade in that regard.

Rather, the screen is high-quality enough to seem better all-round than the 5-inch screens of more expensive phones, and the body isn’t so big and awkward it feels like wielding a chopping board as a phone.

You still need to consider whether you’ll appreciate the larger screen size over a smaller body, though. Things like games and films look fantastic on the Huawei Ascend Mate 7, while offering the phone-style convenience that you don’t get with something like the Nexus 7. But pulling the phone out for a quick snap really doesn’t feel as nimble as it would with a smaller phone.

It’s all about where your priorities sit. Screen size needs to be near the top. But if it is, this is one of the best-value options. There are no serious compromises in the hardware by current standards, and while there are plenty of Huawei quirks to raise an eyebrow at, many can be patched up. And when the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 costs more than £200 less than the Galaxy Note 4, that’s not a bad compromise.

Verdict

The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 is one of the first 6-inch phones that avoids being a royal pain to use. The software is quirkier than a French art house film, but good performance elsewhere makes up for it.

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BlackBerry is trying a new tactic to lure customers back — by paying them to switch phones.

The Waterloo, Ont.-based smartphone maker says it will pay iPhone users as much as $600 to switch to a BlackBerry Passport phone.

Canadian iPhone users with iPhone 4s or later makes are eligible for up to $400 in trade-in value, depending on the model of the iPhone, plus a $200 top-up from BlackBerry.

U.S. users are eligible for up to the same amount, plus a $150 US top-up. Users with the newest iPhone 6 model are eligible for the highest trade-in value, up to $400.

Only North American users are eligible for the trade-in program, and the iPhone must be in working condition.

Anyone trading in iPhones must purchase a new BlackBerry from ShopBlackBerry.com or from Amazon.com. The money will be provided on a prepaid Visa gift card and mailed to users within six weeks of receiving the iPhone and proof of purchase of a Passport, according to a blog post by BlackBerry.The promotion starts Dec. 1 and runs to Feb. 13, 2015.

On Monday, BlackBerry and CEO John Chen announced the Passport phone is available in new colours, white and red, in addition to black.

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Side by side on a table, the two nearly identical rectangular handsets look innocuous enough and extremely familiar. Yet two things quietly make the Samsung Galaxy A3 and Samsung Galaxy A5 stand out: their all-aluminum material and their unibody construction. Following the metal-framed (and plastic-backed) Samsung Galaxy Alpha and Galaxy Note 4, the Galaxy A5 and Galaxy A3 represent Samsung's first stab at an all-metal build, and the first of its smartphones to seal in the battery completely.

The square-sided handsets look and feel good, similar to Galaxy Alpha, or like smaller, more maneuverable versions of the Note 4. They're also on the light side and are noticeably slim - in fact, they're the most svelte Galaxy phones yet. Don't look for any real standout textures or design elements to show off the move to metal; these smooth-backed specimens are understated as far as that goes.

Since the back cover isn't removable, you'll find the SIM-card and microSD-card slots on the right edge. In some countries, a hybrid slot will accommodate either a second SIM or a storage card, just not both at the same time. As midrange phones, you won't find a heart-rate monitor built in with the camera module; Samsung says that sensor is reserved for more premium phones like the Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 4, and Galaxy Alpha.

Midrange specs

You might think that luxe metal casings like these would house equally high-end specs, but the A series is actually defined by midrange specs that target a more youthful demographic. Samsung's market studies revealed that this group isn't fussy about top-flight hardware, but is turning toward the metal trend in a serious way.

Samsung also points out that the Galaxy A5 ad Galaxy A3 emphasize sound quality, with adjustable audio that increases volume when it detects competing background noise. Another feature, called Wise Voice, helps keep volume levels constant for the receiver even if you're holding the phone away from your face. Sounds good in theory, though I didn't get a chance to test out either enhancement.

In terms of color, both the Galaxy A3 and Galaxy A5 will come in six shades. There's the usual black and white, gold and silver metallics, and the same blossom pink and light blue as the Note 4. As usual, not every color will be available in every country.

Extra themes

Android 4.4 KitKat is the OS standard for these phones, with Samsung's TouchWiz interface on top. In a nod to self-expression, a new take on the UI lets you apply four new themes -- such as "nature" -- that applies pre-selected images and ringtones. The Galaxy A3 and Galaxy A5 also have their own unique touch sounds that other Galaxy phones don't.

Supercharged selfies

The Galaxy A3 and Galaxy A5 may fall in the middle of the hardware spectrum, but they have a few fun new camera features dedicated to selfies, another huge trend we're seeing in smartphones.

It all starts with wide-angle selfies that shoot up to 100 degrees in portrait and a 120-degree landscape/panorama mode. The Galaxy A3 and Galaxy A5 also get the same rear-camera selfie feature first seen on the Note 4. In addition, the airbrushing Beauty mode found in pretty much every Samsung and LG front-facing camera goes a step further here with effects to correct your skin tone and slim your face, plus one to enlarge your eyes. If you prefer to send your selfies au naturel, you'll have the option to turn this off.

You can trigger selfies with a voice prompt as before, and Samsung also adds the ability to launch a count-down by holding your hand in front of the camera. You'll have 3 seconds to get your palm out of the way before the shutter snaps to life.

Also brand-new is an animated GIF mode, which combines up to 20 pictures you capture by pressing and holding the shutter button. You can adjust the frame rate for 1-to-10 frames per second, and also tweak the GIF quality using a sliding scale. You'll also be able to reorder frames and adjust the settings before saving your animated GIF.

It's a cute idea, but one that's clearly still in its infancy. Quality on my GIF was choppy in my hands-on demo, and that's because it caps off at a 640x480-pixel video resolution. Sharing is also limited. While animated GIFS are shareable through a messaging app, it wasn't clear if you could upload them to social networks like Facebook.

Where can I get Galaxy A5 and Galaxy A3, and for how much?

The Galaxy A3 and Galaxy A5 will launch in Asia first in November (including China), followed by rest of the world. While Samsung hasn't released pricing or distribution details yet (carriers will likely do that on their own), look for costs of unlocked models to come in significantly lower than the Note 4.

Outlook

Once again, Samsung's approach of aiming its first fully metal devices to the middle of the market rather than the tippy-top is a different strategy than I'd have expected from the smartphone leader. It isn't an unreasonable position, however. Appearances matter, and with midrange specs largely on par with competing devices, the more premium metal may very well help the Galaxy A3 and Galaxy A5 stand out against rival phones.

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