Huawei Ascend G510 review

HARDWARE

The Huawei Ascend G510 uses a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8225 Snapdragon S4 chipset; S4 is among the latest of Qualcomm products, though this is among the slowest chipsets in the range. It showed in the SunSpider benchmark with a SunSpider score of 2.513ms. That makes it less than half the speed as the fastest phones; it’s not a bad score for a budget phone, but if you’re a keen mobile internet user you might want to think about spending more on a better handset.

Basic 3D games won’t be a problem, but console-like graphical extravaganzas will struggle here as its GPU only scored 2,622 in 3DMark’s Icestorm test. To put this in context it only averaged around 10fps in this demanding test, well short of a smooth 30fps.

The back panel is easy to clip off, letting you get at the slots beneath it

There’s NFC built-in for quick and easy file transfers with other such-equipped hardware, and it has a micro SD card slot so you can expand the 1GB of free internal memory with up to a 32GB card. The battery has a 1,700mAh capacity and lasted for a respectable seven hours and 32 minutes in our video playback test.

CONCLUSION

The G510 does everything that most people want from a smartphone, and its take on Android is pretty easy to get the hang of once you get your head around losing the app tray. On pay-as-you-go it was a great smartphone at a very reasonable price, and so won our Budget Buy award when it launched.

It’s now widely available on pay as you go for around £80. If you’re on a seriously tight budget this phone is an excellent deal. While it is stuck on Android 4.1, with no chance of an update, it is still a capable handset.

It has a large screen, fast processor and a decent battery, making it a good all-round Android phone. Back in April 2013 it cost £130 and received our Budget Buy award. Now, in May 2014 you can pick one up for almost half the price. While it runs at less than half the speed of the newest, fastest phones this is still one of the better performing budget handsets.

The Motorola Moto G is available for £120 and that is still by far and away the best low-cost Android phone, but for people on an even tighter budget the Huawei Ascend G510 is a great option.