Like many people that I have seen on the web, I picked up the Huawei Ascend XT on Black Friday weekend from Walmart for $49.00, which was a steal and an impulse buy. I wanted to get it as a backup phone in the event something happened to one of our other phones. This phone is being sold as an AT&T GoPhone and appears to be a Walmart exclusive, but it just as easily could be used on any of AT&Ts plans.
So, here are my impressions of the phone. I will start with the hardware. The case of the phone is one piece plastic which has a nice rounded feel to it. This phone feels and looks better than most plastic phones that I have seen. The power and volume buttons are placed on the right side of the phone with the power button being just below the volume buttons. This makes it easy to hit the volume button when going for the power button and vice versa. The speaker is on the bottom of the phone and is nice and loud and has a good sound to it. The screen is 6.0” and is 720x1280. I find the display to be quite good and bight. The icons will be bigger on this phone than on another phone with higher resolution. I did not have a problem with the display being only 720x1280.
The phone performs quite well in most circumstances, I did find some lag in typing on some web pages, but most were quite responsive. I had no problems playing casual games and the phone handled games like Temple Run 2 quite well. I couple of issues that I noticed were 1) sometimes when sliding from one homescreen to the next, the widgets would redraw on the homescreen that you are sliding to. This is probably due to Huawei getting aggressive with battery life, 2) it is too easy to tap the home button to go home or close an app and cause Google Now on Tap to launch if you have it activated. This feature is supposed to perform a search related to what’s on the screen when you hold down on the home button. I found it way too easy to activate this by just doing a normal tap on the home button.
Huawei has skinned Android with their eMUI 4.1 skin, which was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. There are a couple of things to note on this. In the App drawer you cannot create folders and group your apps together, you can only do that on the home screen. I am used to having shortcuts and notifications available when you pull down the notification shade. Huawei separates outs the Notifications and the Shortcuts into 2 separate tabs. This means that you see more of your notifications, but if you want to toggle WiFi or some other service on or off, you have to tap the Shortcuts tab to do that instead of it being at the top of the notifications screen.
One of the odd things I found on the Ascend XT was how they deal with the wallpaper. The default lock screen wallpaper rotates between 20 different images and if you want to change the wallpaper on the lock screen, it has to be the same as the home screen. There are 2 ways to get around this, one is to install an alternate lock screen app or to remove the contents of the MagazineUnlock folder and put your photo in there. The photo has to be 720x1280 and named like the photos that you removed from the MagazineUnlock folder (hopefully you moved them to another folder and not deleted them).
This phone has a 3,000 mAh battery (which is non-removable) and it has no problem getting you through the day. I have used this phone all day with a good 4 hours or more of Screen time and did not exhaust the battery. This is probably due to the screen resolution being 720x1280, meaning it does not have to refresh as many pixels as some other phones with higher resolution and battery optimizations that Huawei is doing behind the scenes. If you are not a heavy phone user, you could probably get two days use on a full battery.
The call quality on this phone is very good I had no problems with dropped calls and the calls sounded very clear. The rear camera is an 8 megapixel camera with LED flash. It takes good photos with plenty of light, but when things are a little darker you will see a lot of detail missing in the photo when you zoom in. The Ascend XT will handle a 64 GB micro SD card without any problems.
So, what are my final thoughts on this phone, it is a good phone and it is worth getting at $100, which is Walmart current price on this phone. With a $100 phone you are not going to get the quality, speed and refinement of a flagship phone that costs 7 0r 8 times more. But if you are on a budget or don’t want to spend that $800 for the next best thing, give this phone a try. My only regret is that I wish I had bought another one at the Black Friday price.
So, here are my impressions of the phone. I will start with the hardware. The case of the phone is one piece plastic which has a nice rounded feel to it. This phone feels and looks better than most plastic phones that I have seen. The power and volume buttons are placed on the right side of the phone with the power button being just below the volume buttons. This makes it easy to hit the volume button when going for the power button and vice versa. The speaker is on the bottom of the phone and is nice and loud and has a good sound to it. The screen is 6.0” and is 720x1280. I find the display to be quite good and bight. The icons will be bigger on this phone than on another phone with higher resolution. I did not have a problem with the display being only 720x1280.
The phone performs quite well in most circumstances, I did find some lag in typing on some web pages, but most were quite responsive. I had no problems playing casual games and the phone handled games like Temple Run 2 quite well. I couple of issues that I noticed were 1) sometimes when sliding from one homescreen to the next, the widgets would redraw on the homescreen that you are sliding to. This is probably due to Huawei getting aggressive with battery life, 2) it is too easy to tap the home button to go home or close an app and cause Google Now on Tap to launch if you have it activated. This feature is supposed to perform a search related to what’s on the screen when you hold down on the home button. I found it way too easy to activate this by just doing a normal tap on the home button.
Huawei has skinned Android with their eMUI 4.1 skin, which was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. There are a couple of things to note on this. In the App drawer you cannot create folders and group your apps together, you can only do that on the home screen. I am used to having shortcuts and notifications available when you pull down the notification shade. Huawei separates outs the Notifications and the Shortcuts into 2 separate tabs. This means that you see more of your notifications, but if you want to toggle WiFi or some other service on or off, you have to tap the Shortcuts tab to do that instead of it being at the top of the notifications screen.
One of the odd things I found on the Ascend XT was how they deal with the wallpaper. The default lock screen wallpaper rotates between 20 different images and if you want to change the wallpaper on the lock screen, it has to be the same as the home screen. There are 2 ways to get around this, one is to install an alternate lock screen app or to remove the contents of the MagazineUnlock folder and put your photo in there. The photo has to be 720x1280 and named like the photos that you removed from the MagazineUnlock folder (hopefully you moved them to another folder and not deleted them).
This phone has a 3,000 mAh battery (which is non-removable) and it has no problem getting you through the day. I have used this phone all day with a good 4 hours or more of Screen time and did not exhaust the battery. This is probably due to the screen resolution being 720x1280, meaning it does not have to refresh as many pixels as some other phones with higher resolution and battery optimizations that Huawei is doing behind the scenes. If you are not a heavy phone user, you could probably get two days use on a full battery.
The call quality on this phone is very good I had no problems with dropped calls and the calls sounded very clear. The rear camera is an 8 megapixel camera with LED flash. It takes good photos with plenty of light, but when things are a little darker you will see a lot of detail missing in the photo when you zoom in. The Ascend XT will handle a 64 GB micro SD card without any problems.
So, what are my final thoughts on this phone, it is a good phone and it is worth getting at $100, which is Walmart current price on this phone. With a $100 phone you are not going to get the quality, speed and refinement of a flagship phone that costs 7 0r 8 times more. But if you are on a budget or don’t want to spend that $800 for the next best thing, give this phone a try. My only regret is that I wish I had bought another one at the Black Friday price.
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