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Shenzhen headquartered Chinese multinational networking and telecommunications equipment major Huawei is said to be rolling out the Android 5.1 Lollipop firmware to its Ascend Mate 2 mid-range phablet. The new Lollipop-based ROM however, is far from the final stable build, and Huawei is only making it available through its website, and not OTA for obvious reasons. The firmware underwent an extensive bout of beta testing earlier this month, subsequent to which, the first release preview is now available for DIY enthusiasts to download and flash onto their smartphones.
Announcing the availability of the new Lollipop-based firmware, Huawei said on its website, “Starting today, Android 5.1 (Lollipop) is available to Huawei Ascend Mate 2 owners. This major update also includes Huawei’s new EMUI 3.1 software. Interested customers can download and install this first release version of the software now. Huawei will continue to enhance the software, even after this initial version is made available, to deliver the best experience to you, our customers. We look forward to your feedback”.
The Huawei Ascend Mate 2 was announced in January, 2014 as a follow-up to the hugely popular Huawei Ascend, which the company had launched the previous year. The phone is a giant phablet, sporting a massive 6.1-inch IPS LCD display, with a 1280 x 720 resolution. The phone is powered by a Qualcomm MSM8928 Snapdragon 400 SoC with a quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU clocked at 1.6 GHz, and an Adreno 305 GPU. The device comes with 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal storage. The primary rear-facing camera on the device comes with a 13-megapixel sensor, and the secondary selfie-cam on the front comes with a 5-megapixel sensor.
As for connectivity options, the device supports 2G GSM, 3G HSPA and 4G LTE, along with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct and DLNA, whilst also supporting Bluetooth 4.0. The smartphone carries a 4,050 mAh Li-Ion battery, and originally came with Android 4.3 Jelly Bean out the box with Huawei’s Emotion UI 2.0 on top. Last year itself, the company had revealed the device will skip KitKat and will be updated directly to Lollipop, and hopefully pretty soon, the firmware will achieve its stable build and will be rolled out universally to all users worldwide.