Huawei Ascend G510

Introduction

The Huawei G-series has, over the past couple of years, offered some of the best budget Android phones you can get. The Huawei Ascend G510 wants to continue this trend, offering slight upgrades over its half-predecessor the Ascend G330.

Huawei Ascend G510 – Design and Feature

A by-product of driving for a low-price approach means that your handset probably isn’t going to look or feel all that snazzy. The Huawei Ascend G510 is a plastic-rear phone that curiously peppers its rear with false seams. It looks as though there’s a pull-off plastic battery cover, but it’s actually just a groove in the lightly pearlescent white plastic.



But who doesn’t love seams? Yes, it’s a slightly odd design choice.

The whole rear of the phone is a single plastic plate that you can pull off using a single indent by the edge of the screen. We didn’t investigate further for fear of setting off alarm bells at the MWC 2013 conference where the phone was shown.



What you will find under the Huawei Ascend G510 shell, though, is a Micro SD memory card slot and a dual SIM slot. It’s this feature that has ensured the 300-series Huawei phones are those with wide distribution in the UK – dual-SIM phones aren’t very popular here.



As well as this oddball pick, you get all the usual Android connectivity standards, only missing out on NFC. There’s 4GB of internal memory, and a rather lowly 512MB of RAM.

Huawei Ascend G510 – Screen

The Huawei Ascend G510 has a 4.5-inch 854 x 480 pixel IPS display. Although the core IPS tech is decent enough, this low a resolution spread across 4.5 inches is starting to look distinctly musty. Our Retina-attuned eyes look for visible pixel structure too readily – and text here can look a tiny bit blocky.

Curiously, Its direct predecessor the Huawei Ascend G500 had a higher-res 960 x 540 pixel display – and it was a mite smaller too at 4.3 inches.

Huawei Ascend G510 – Software and Interface

Like most Huawei phones, the Huawei Ascend G510 runs Android, and sports a custom UI. The version of Android used at present is 4.1 Jelly Bean. It’s not the latest version as 4.2 has already landed, but this is available in virtually no phones.

The UI on show is Huawei’s own Emotion interface. It’s among the more invasive custom UIs, because it fundamentally changes how Android is laid out. 



The Huawei Ascend G510 drop the homescreen-app menu two-part structure of Android, flattening it into a more iOS-like single plane. Core phone features are then dumped into folders to give you some level of organisation. It takes a bit of getting used to if you’ve used Android for a while.

With a mid-range dual-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A9 processor, the phone isn’t blazingly fast, but it did seem nippier than the Ascend G330 – the last G-series Huawei phone we tested.

Huawei Ascend G510 – Camera

Continuing the distinctly lower-mid range specs roster, the Huawei Ascend G510 has two unremarkable camera sensors. It offers a 5-megapixel main sensor with an LED flash, and a VGA video call camera. Judging by Huawei’s previous phone camera performance, don’t expect to use the G510’s camera for anything more than casual social networking snaps.

Huawei Ascend G510 – Impressions

We like the Huawei G series. It has provided the cash-strapped with some great, and affordable, Android phones. However, the Huawei Ascend G510 will need to sell at a bargain price to seem worthwhile. Some of its core specs are worse than those of its direct predecessor and we’re not all that convinced by the Huawei Emotion UI. We’ll be back with more in our full review, assuming the dual-SIM G510 comes to the UK