| Review of the Huawei Ascend Y300 |
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The Huawei Ascend Y300 is a super-low-end phone that is presently sold in Canada by Bell Mobility as an entry-level prepaid phone. They usually sell it for $100 outright, but at the time of this writing (leading up to Christmas no doubt) you can buy one for just $80. It might even be possible to get it even cheaper elsewhere. Last Updated: 15-Dec-2013 |
Before reading this review,
please read Some Thoughts on Phone Reviewing.
So what does $80 buy you? And how does it stand up to the
Motorola Moto G, which sells for around
$180 (on sale for $150 from Koodo at the time of this writing)? Let’s find out…
RF Performance
Like the Moto G, the Y300 does not support LTE. I guess LTE chipsets still cost
too much money and would unnecessarily raise the price of the phone. However,
you do still get HSPA, though surprisingly just 7.2 Mbps HSPA. It’s been quite
some time since we had phones that didn’t support HSPA speeds higher than this.
Even 2 to 3 years ago, support for 21.6 Mbps was common, and many phones also
supposed dual channel HSPA which effectively provided a theoretical maximum of
43.2 Mbps. My Nokia N95 8GB from 2008
supported 7.2 Mbps HSPA, and it quickly became out-of-date.
I headed downstairs to my basement to see how well the Y300 worked when the
service was weakened. For the most part, it managed to sustain similar speeds to
the Samsung Galaxy S4, despite having a
lesser HSPA radio. This is probably because under the conditions found in my
basement none of the HSPA+ features work and the radio falls back to the lesser
air interface anyway.
I next moved on to my dryer, which makes an excellent Faraday Cage for weakening
the signal even further. This demonstrated that the Y300 doesn’t have quite as
much RF sensitivity and it will loose service when the S4 can hang on to it, but
the margins are slim. Since the Moto G performed just as well as the S4 in HSPA,
we can infer that that the S4 is an acceptable stand-in for the Moto G in this
test. The conclusion is therefore this: the Y300 holds up well in weak service
areas, but it doesn’t quite match the Moto G when the signal gets really weak.
Top-end transfer rates however will be limited by the radio technology used in
this device.
WiFi Performance
For the price, you really wouldn’t expect much from a phone like this, but
surprisingly it does exceptionally well. During tests I performed on the Y300,
along with the Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini
and the LG G2, the Y300 actually did the best of the
lot and it came the closest to matching the performance of my Galaxy S4.
When it comes to maximum speed however, the phone seems to top out at 15 Mbps,
though this isn’t surprising because top speed is a function of processor power
and not the WiFi chip per se. When signals get weak however, the Y300 can
provide data speeds that are the equal of, or better than, the other 3 phones I
tested.
Audio Performance
The native earpiece in the Y300 acquits itself nicely, with pretty good tonal
balance (it’s just a tiny bit peaky) and volume that can at least match what the
Moto G has to offer. The speakerphone sounds good, but it wasn’t particularly
loud. I didn’t have a Moto G to compare with directly, but based on what I’d
said about the Moto G speakerphone however, the Y300 is likely quite close in
both volume and clarity.
Multimedia Audio
This aspect of the phone was actually a big surprise. I had expected pretty
awful audio from this device, but what I got instead was quite pleasant. It
beats the Moto G, LG G2, and Xperia Z1, all
of which had very tinny sound that actually very annoying. In fact, the Y300 is
very much like the Moto X, which also
delivers a pleasant tone at the expense of the high end. Maximum volume could do
with being a somewhat louder, but overall listening to multimedia audio on the
Y300 is, as I stated at the beginning of this paragraph, very PLEASANT.
Display
You don’t expect much in a phone in this price class, but when you compare it
with the much more expensive S3 Mini you get a surprisingly good display. Like
the S3 Mini it offers 800 x 480 on a 4-inch panel, but unlike the S3 Mini it
does not use Pentile sub-pixels and as a result it actually provides crisper
text and more solid colors. The S3 Mini has the advantage of an AMOLED screen,
which provides deeper blacks and richer colors. The Moto G completely blows it
away however, with an incredibly good 1280 x 720 screen that is anything but
low-end.
The screen brightness changes quite a bit as you move from looking straight on.
Horizontally it just gets dimmer the closer to 90 degrees you get, but
vertically it is its darkest at 45 degrees, and then gets brighter toward 90
degrees. There is very little color or contrast distortion as viewing angle
increases, which actually makes it a better display in that regard than the
1080p screen of the Xperia Z1.
The glass is billed as SCRATCH-RESISTANT, but it’s not Gorilla Glass and it
seems to have absolutely no anti-grease coating at all. Given those realities,
you’ll DEFINITELY want to buy a PET screen protector for this phone. Even if you
don’t care about protecting the screen against scratches, the PET sheets do
provide a reasonable amount of oil resistance. As it stands, the glass on the
screen of the Y300 is a fingerprint magnet.
Processor and Chipset
The Y300 comes with a fairly lackluster dual-core processor clocked at 1.0 GHz,
coupled with an Adreno 203 GPU. This particular combination yields very
disappointing performance. Simply put, the phone is a SLUG. Its responsiveness
is at least as poor as the first-generation single-core Samsung Galaxy phones
and SMOOTH is NOT a word that would ever spring from your lips while working
with this device.
Perhaps I’ve just become spoiled over the years, but I found the sluggishness of
this phone profoundly annoying. This was especially true after I’d spent time
playing with the Moto G, which is refreshingly snappy for a low-end model. It
may be $100 more expensive, but it’s not difficult to FEEL what you’re getting
for your money with a Moto G.
Camera
When it comes to still shots, the Y300 doesn’t really do any better or any worse
than either the Moto G or the S3 Mini. All of these cameras provide passable 5
megapixel cameras that are great for taking shots to post on your social media
streams, but not much else. Surprisingly the Y300 has a front-facing camera.
You’d think with all the cost-cutting they were doing on this model they’d have
opted to leave out the second camera, even though it is just a 640 x 480 device.
However, it’s the video aspect that is surprisingly outdated. It has been ages
since I’ve tested a phone whose highest video resolution is just 480p. It almost
seems impossible to wrap my head around the idea that phones are still sold
today that have this kind of limitation. This is probably a restriction imposed
by the low processing power available in this phone.
GPS
After the horrifically poor GPS performance in the top-of-the-line LG G2, it’s
actually refreshing to find such a good performer in the Y300. Now granted this
chip only supports GPS (no Glonass), but the receiver is quite sensitive and it
can find a lock very quickly. The lack of Glonass will result in great
inaccuracy in the cavernous downtown areas of cities, and the tree-covered roads
in the country, but at least it works well.
In a related note, the Y300 does not have a compass. That’s something I’ve never
encountered in my years of testing smartphones. Any app that relies on a compass
still runs without error, but there is NO compass data to read. The phone does
however support the standard accelerometer.
Battery Life
The Y300 only has a 1730 mAh battery, but that’s actually larger than the measly
1500 mAh battery provided with the S3 Mini. It’s smaller than the 2070 mAh
battery in the Moto G. I didn’t do extensive testing, but the battery life is
actually not too bad for a low-end phone.
Android
The Y300 comes only with Android 4.1, which puts it well behind the Moto G which
presently comes with Android 4.3 (and will soon get 4.4 it seems). Even the S3
Mini, which isn’t worth the $250 they want for it, comes with 4.2.2.
Conclusions
I came away from this review with a fairly good idea of what $100 ($80 on-sale)
can buy you in a smartphone, and it isn’t much. Huawei have gone to great
lengths to keep costs low and they pass that along to you in the form of a low
price, but the sacrifices you’ll have to make are daunting.
While the Y300 is actually not too shabby when it comes to phone duties, it
leaves much to be desired in the smartphone department. The Moto G is simply
light years better than the Y300, but it does cost $80 more (when these devices
aren’t on sale). However, unless you are pinching every penny (and $80 is an
obscene amount EXTRA to spend on something that already does PRETTY MUCH what
you want), then the Y300 is a poor choice. The Moto G is just so much better
that you’ll probably end up wishing you’d bought one anyway. It reminds me of
the old expression “buy right or buy twice”.
