Huawei Ascend Mate 2 Review: Incredible Battery Life & Value

Software

While fans of AOSP and those that generally like to flash custom ROMs often don't care at all about the stock UI that comes with a phone, the vast majority of people end up using whatever ships with the phone. It's not unusual to see users refusing to update past the launch firmware, so it's important to evaluate the software as-is, rather than focusing upon updates that could arrive months after the initial launch. In this case, we'll be looking at Huawei's EmotionUI 2.0 Lite, which runs on top of Android 4.3 for the launch firmware.

Unfortunately, if there's any one place where the Mate2 falls flat, it's the software. That's not to say that it's necessarily bad, it's just not as surprisingly good as other aspects of the device. The UI is very much like MIUI in style, and overall usability. While some may find this to be great, it can actually be a problem for those used to UIs more similar to AOSP UI. This means that by default, the launcher has no app drawer, and every application icon is placed somewhere on a homescreen. Therefore, searching for an application can be difficult if you don't immediately recall which homescreen it's on. Editing homescreens is very much similar to the experience one might have experienced on TouchWiz 4 as seen below, and while it's easy to understand, it doesn't really mesh well with currrent Android design guidelines. However, for the most part applications in the UI are built to fit Google's design guidelines, so using a custom launcher can alleviate some of the issues. I'm not too sure about the general aesthetics of the UI though, as there are some issues going on there as well, especially in how the iconography is distinctly un-Android. I should also mention that we both experienced issues with the camera application crashing when it's opened from a sleep state, although for some reason as soon as we tried to get a screenshot of the issue it mysteriously stopped happening. The simple home mode is also surprisingly useful as a tile-based launcher, although it effectively disables most widgets. I've included a screenshot of this mode below as well.

Outside of some oddness in the UI design, Huawei included a bunch of surprisingly useful applications. For example, the backup utility makes it possible to save applications, photos, and system data to the microSD card or internal storage. This means that a factory data reset no longer requires a significant amount of time to restore settings and applications, something that most Android phones can't do. Huawei also included the ability to selectively permit what applications are allowed to hold wakelock, which works based upon a whitelist system. Huawei also includes three different power plans, Smart, Endurance, and Normal. It seems to me that Smart and Normal share similar CPU/GPU governors, but it's likely that network management is the major difference in this case. Endurance seems to take things one step further by clocking the CPUs down to a max of 1 GHz (998 MHz to be exact), and while there's nothing wrong with this, it's probably not the best idea from a race to sleep perspective. There are a lot of neat features that I've included screenshots of in the gallery, but most of these are small touches rather than major features to discuss.