The Huawei Ascend Mate phablet has been launched in Australia in April 17th. Having a screen size of 6.1 inch, it is significantly larger than competing devices, in particular the Samsung Galaxy Note II which has a screen size of 5.5 inch. When the device was unveiled to the public in February at the Customer Electronics show in Las Vegas, Huawei said that there is currently a gap in the market between smartphone and tablet users and the Ascent Mate is the ideal device to fill this gap. I still don’t see myself carrying a 6.1 inch phone in the pockets of my trousers. Having said this, there are many people who find no problem in carrying a Galaxy Note II or similarly sized device in their pants.
The Ascend Mate uses 1.5 Ghz quad core processors and 2 GB RAM. It supports a resolution of 1280 x 720 and runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. The front camera has a resolution of 1 megapixel while the back camera has a resolution of 8 megapixels. Inside the Mate resides a huge 4050mAh battery, which, according to Huawei, will provide about two days of average usage. Huawei’s new phablet supports the so called Magic Touch interface, a technology that enables users to use the phone while wearing gloves.
One drawback of the Ascend Mate is that it will not run on LTE networks, but on the other hand it can be used on five different 3G bands and different 4 GSM bands. The Ascent Mate is currently only available in black colour.
