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The Huawei G 300 has a fantastic specification for a £100 smartphone, but our initial impression of it wasn’t good. Its screen was nowhere near bright enough and it was painfully slow. After we’d turned off PowerSaver and automatic brightness the Ascend G 300 became much quicker and more responsive.
The Ascend G 300 has a 1GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage – of which 2GB is available to the user – and a 5-megapixel camera. This easily puts some of the more expensive devices to shame. Indeed, it rendered the BBC News homepage in 12 seconds, which is quicker than the Sony Xperia P.
It also has a decent screen resolution of 800×480, which means onscreen icons and text are smoothly rendered, unlike some other budget Android smartphones with lower resolutions, such as the LG Optimus L3.
Once unnecessary power-saving features have been disabled, the user interface is smoother, quicker and more responsive, but not as much as some other phones, such as the Xperia P or Galaxy Ace 2. Even so, it’s perfectly acceptable for a £100 smartphone.
We also like the initial unlock screen, which lets you enter straight in to phone, camera and message modes in addition to the home screen when you unlock. This is incredibly handy if you want to make a call in a hurry.
The Ascend G 300 comes with a decent selection of apps, including a productivity document viewer that let us view our MS Excel, Word and PowerPoint files, including those saved in the 2010 format. We could also open and view PDF documents. You get the usual navigation, music and video apps, and the Navigation app looks particularly good on the Ascend G 300’s large, bright screen. You can, of course, also download apps from Google Play, and BBC iPlayer worked perfectly, as did MX Player. The Ascend G 300 made Ken and Ching’s Exploring China series even more pleasurable than it usually is.
Sadly, it’s when using apps that the limitations of this budget phone become apparent. Often, it became unresponsive for a short while, as if it had exhausted itself on the app and needed to sit down for a while to recover.
Similarly, while the Ascend G 300’s large screen makes it easy to read web pages, but scrolling around a web page is a jerky and, at times, slow experience. This is in comparison to much more expensive phones, and it’s something you can easily live with given the low price of the phone.
The 2GB of storage available to the user is enough for a few albums, but you can further expand the storage with a microSD card.
Our initial frustration with the Ascend G 300 was quickly quashed, and we soon came to love this unit. It isn’t the best smartphone available, but it’s charming and it proves you don’t have to spend a fortune to get a proper smartphone. Sadly, the Ascend G 300’s currently only available from Vodafone, but that could give you a good excuse to jump ship to a new provider. If you want a good, basic smartphone, you should check out the Huawei Ascend G 300.
