Newsletter
At CES 2014, Chinese manufacturer Huawei announced yet another giant smartphone, building on the original Ascend Mate, the Mate 2 4G is a 6.1-inch device that’s designed for those who want a device that can practically do it all. With some decent horsepower under the hood, the Huawei Ascend Mate 2 4G is packing a 1.6 Ghz quad-core CPU backed up with 2GB of RAM under the hood and features a massive battery coming in at 4,000 mAh. However, for a 6.1-inch device, you would expect such a large capacity battery.
Where things fall down however, is in that display’s resolution, coming in at just 1280 x 720, but then again the Ascend Mat line was never designed to the best of the best, and instead strives to offer consumers a great compromise on size, performance and price. Last time we saw it, the Ascend Mate 2 was running Android 4.3, which is a little bit behind the times at this point, but hopefully Huawei will be able to send a KitKat update to this goliath some time shortly. With LTE Cat4 for downloads of 150mbps, the Ascend Mate 2 should work well on LTE over here.
Huawei is opening a US-based online store at www.gethuawei.com, with the Ascend Mate 2 being the first of (hopefully) many devices the manufacturer is going to be selling direct to US customers. With the device costing just $450 or so in China, it’ll be interesting to see how much the Ascend Mate 2 is to cost here in the US, and hopefully it’ll be under the $500 mark unlocked, otherwise Huawei might struggle to sell these in any great numbers. While Huawei is still looked upon as a threat to national security by the US Government, it looks like they’re at least able to sell their own smartphones here, which is a good thing for all of us. More competition is a good thing, but we can’t imagine Huawei will be left alone for long, especially as intelligence agencies like the NSA are all but convinced Huawei is being used to spy on the US people. We reviewed the Ascend Mate last year and found it to be a decent phone, so there’s no reason this year’s offering won’t be either.