Trusted Reviews is supported by its audience. If you purchase through links on our site, we may earn a commission. Learn more.

Huawei Ascend P2 Review - Call Quality, Battery Life and Verdict Review

Michael Sawh By Michael Sawh
Contributor

Call Quality, Battery Life and Verdict

Is the 'fastest smartphone in the world' actually the best Android phone to buy?

By Michael Sawh August 9th 2013 12:00pm

Sections

Huawei Ascend P2 – Call Quality

Like the P6, the P2’s call quality performance is helped by a secondary microphone. This delivers active noise cancellation to drown out background noise to keep calls loud and clear.

The noise cancelling mic lives up to its impressive billing, as does the earpiece speaker. Calls have good clarity and volume, and we had no complaints from the other end, either.

Smartphone lying on a wooden surface for a product review.

Huawei Ascend P2 – Battery life

The Huawei Ascend P2 has a non-removable 2,420 mAh battery, which is about what we’d expect for phone of this size and price. It surpasses the battery size of the P6, but falls below the 3,000mAh battery stored inside the 5-inch Ascend D2.

In general use the P2 comfortably manages a day and a half. When you hit critical battery levels and need a quick charge, the P2 picks up power nice and quick. Within 20 minutes of charging, the P2 jumped from 7% back up to 25%.

Should I buy the Huawei Ascend P2?

The Huawei Ascend P2 is a good phone, but it won’t blow you away in any particular department. 

The screen is the pick of the features and is up there with the HTC One Mini‘s screen. While the quad-core processor sounds impressive on paper, in reality there isn’t much difference between the P2 and dual-core offerings like the One Mini and the S4 Mini in terms of performance. In fact, in games it’s a little slower.

But it’s Huawei’s Emotion UI that could prove the decisive factor. It won’t be to everyone’s tastes. It wasn’t for us and we’d opt for the HTC One Mini, Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini or even the Galaxy S3 ahead of the P2.

For more options, head to our best Android phones round-up.

Verdict

The Huawei Ascend P2 has a great screen and is fast enough for most, but the software is not as slick as other Android offerings and there’s simply not enough going on to help the P2 stand out from the smartphone crowd.

We test every mobile phone we review thoroughly. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly and we use the phone as our main device over the review period. We’ll always tell you what we find and we never, ever, accept money to review a product.

Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.

Used as our main phone for the review period

Reviewed using respected industry benchmarks and real world testing

Always has a SIM card installed

Tested with phone calls, games and popular apps

Trusted Score

rating-star rating-star rating-star rating-star rating-star

Score in detail

  • Performance 8
  • Camera 7
  • Design 7
  • Usability 7
  • Value 7
  • Features 8
  • Screen Quality 8
Michael Sawh
By Michael Sawh
Contributor

Michael Sawh is a Freelance Journalist specialising in wearable and fitness tech. Previously Editor of Wareable, he’s also spent time manning the features section at Trusted Reviews and T3. His words …

Why trust our journalism?

Founded in 2003, Trusted Reviews exists to give our readers thorough, unbiased and independent advice on what to buy.

Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.

author icon

Editorial independence

Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.

author icon

Professional conduct

We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.

Why trust our journalism?

Founded in 2003, Trusted Reviews exists to give our readers thorough, unbiased and independent advice on what to buy.

Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.

author icon

Editorial independence

Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.

author icon

Professional conduct

We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.

Trusted Reviews Logo

Sign up to our newsletter

Get the best of Trusted Reviews delivered right to your inbox.

This is a test error message with some extra words