Huawei Ascend P6 review

Another drawback with the Emotion UI is that it seems to impact the phone’s performance. The P6 just doesn’t perform anywhere near as well as it should do, considering it has a quad-core processor and 1.7GB RAM. The phone lags and stutters when you type web addresses into both Chrome and the built-in browser, and is jerky when scrolling around image-heavy websites. The keyboard lags behind your typing, and we’re not fans of having a .com button instead of a space bar, as this makes it fiddly to type in phrases in the browser search bar. It feels much slower than other similarly-priced phones, such as the HTC One Mini and Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini, even though they have two rather than four cores.

Having a .com button rather than a space bar is just annoying

The performance deficit is also shown in our benchmarks. When running the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark in the built-in Mozilla-based browser, the phone limped to complete the test in 3,887ms, which is even slower than that managed by the Samsung Galaxy Young, the previous slowest handset we’d seen. Even when we switched to Google Chrome, the score only improved to 2,541ms, which is only around what we’d expect from a budget Android smartphone.

Things didn’t improve much in 3DMark, where the P6 managed a score of 2,916 – worthy of a budget handset, not a £300-plus one. The built-in Riptide GP 3D racing game was jerky in places. The phone can also only claim average battery life from its 2,000mAh battery, lasting 7h 20m in our light-use battery test. It always gave us a full day’s use and never let us down, though.

We were much more impressed with the P6’s camera, once we’d turned off the software effects. The default Smart mode made a mess of our outdoor shots, with huge overexposure and a strange lined pattern in the sky. When we turned the Smart mode off photos were far better, with accurate exposures and colours. The camera also made a reasonable job of indoor shots in low light; these showed more noise than our current low-light champions, the HTC One and One Mini, but definitely had less noise than average.

Smart mode makes a mess of daylight photos’ exposure

But turn the fancy effects off and you’ll get proper exposures and accurate colours

The Huawei Ascend P6 is a lovely design and a genuinely desirable phone, and we’re certainly impressed with its screen and camera. However, it just doesn’t have the performance to live up to its great hardware. When Huawei produces software to match its hardware it will be a force to be reckoned with, but for the moment we’d stick with the HTC One Mini at this price.