Huawei Ascend Y300 review

The Huawei Ascend Y300 originally launched earlier this year at much-touted low price of £60 but you'll be lucky to find it for that now -- it's more likely to be around the £100 mark which, considering its spec, is probably where it should be. 

Design
The Y300 makes no attempt to hide its budget nature and its unlovely chunky black plastic shell makes no attempt to dress itself up as a more expensive device. The 4-inch screen makes for a good size -- big enough to view movies and web pages clearly, but still leaving plenty of room in the pocket. The resolution of 800x480 pixels equates to 233ppi and proves itself to be not bad at all, certainly sharp enough to read fine print on web pages. However, it's not the brightest, and we found it struggled quite a bit when we tried to view it in sunlight.

Huawei Ascend Y300

Huawei

Processor, features and AndroidIt's a bit of a surprise to see a dual-core processor in a phone that barely costs three figures, though it's clocked at 1GHz and backed by just 512MB RAM. It does an okay job, smoothly opening apps, albeit at a slightly leisurely pace, but there didn't appear to be any stuttering, even when we had a clutch of apps running at once.

It launched with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and hasn't yet seen an upgrade to 4.2, let alone the very latest 4.3. That shouldn't be a deal-breaker for aphone in this price range though, since the upgrade differences are fairly minimal. Huawei's Emotion user interface tends to dominate the OS in any case. The home page features a block of windows with essential items like time, date and weather, plus your most popular contacts and a music player. All the other apps are laid out across the various screens (six as standard, expanding to nine), doing away with the need for an app menu, which seems a little odd at first, especially for long-time Android users, though its perhaps more familiar to iPhone owners. 

Huawei Ascend Y300 test photo

Dave Oliver

overburdened with additional features. Still, picture quality isn't bad if you're careful with your light and don't get too ambitious with moving objects. It can record low-res 480p video at 30fps and there's a bog standard VGA camera on the front for video calls.

Memory and batteryThere's just 4GB memory on board and annoyingly, a mere 800MB of that is available for apps, but you can bump up the overall memory by 32GB with a microSD card.

The battery held up fairly well and delivered a good day and a half's worth of steady use, though you can probably get even more if you use the power saving mode, which reduces background data and the phone's haptic feedback.  

ConclusionIt's no looker, it may not be a champ in terms of performance and there's no 4G, but it does have Wi-Fi and GPS, the screen is surprisingly good, the camera is pretty decent and the price is fair enough.