Looking for a budget entry level smartphone? Try the G300
The new Huawei Ascend G300 is almost the perfect entry level smartphone. For buyers on a budget, this Chinese designed and made phone is a little beauty, writes Cyris Cloete.
You don't need to trade in your life to afford a reasonably good smartphone nowadays. The Huawei Ascend G300 falls in the great bargain bin. It has some of the best performance for its $NZ 449 and I can say with pleasure that I'm quite impressed.
Look and Feel
The G300 at first glance strikes a resemblance to the HTC One X, except that it lacks the front facing camera. It has a beautiful design and has a remarkably solid feel for its exterior plastic casing. With the dimensions of 122.5 x 63 x 10.5 mm and weighing in at 140g, it's only 3grams heavier than the iPhone 4. The bottom of the screen houses three touch sensitive controls along with actual volume buttons on the side and also the power button on top, next to the 3.5mm audio jack.
Performance
The G300 boasts a 1Ghz single-core processor which seems pretty common nowadays and can't really compare to the more expensive smartphones that use dual and quad-core processors. You will notice a slight lag when swiping between screens and opening applications. But for its price, you really can't complain. The browser seems to be pretty responsive loading pages efficiently and common games like Angry Birds seem to play perfectly fine.
Operating system
It comes stock running Android OS, v2.3 (Gingerbread) and a promise for the ability to upgrade to Android Ice-Cream Sandwich later this year. It's fairly easy to navigate around and use. But in portrait mode, the keyboard was a bit of a hassle to use and I ended up making numerous mistakes as the virtual keys are really quite close together.
Screen
Now we're talking. At first I thought this wasn't going to be a very good screen to work with but I was quite surprised. It houses a 4-inch 800 x 480 WVGA display which is pretty crisp for a budget phone. Don't get too excited yet though. It might have a fairly nice screen but the touch responsiveness was a bit disappointing. I sometimes found myself double tapping and even triple tapping to get it to respond to my touch.
Camera
It's no iPhone 4s but it does have a reasonably good 5-megapixel (2592х1944 pixels) camera and the all very important autofocus and LED flash (because we all know that the cameras come out when we go out). The picture quality isn't the best. It is a little grainy in daylight and with the flash at night. You cant "pinch to zoom" but it's perfect for those social snapshots if you have the need to share something on your favourite social networks. The G300 has 2.5GB on-board storage memory (which isn't all that much) but luckily it supports a Micro SD card up to 32GB. Below is a YouTube video of its video recording quality.
Battery
I believe this is where I was most impressed. Inside is a standard 1350m Ah Li-Ion battery and since my last Android only lasted about eight hours on standby, I was not expecting a lot. But I gave the G300 a full charge and left it on standby with WiFi permanently enabled for a day and a half. To my surprise when I checked on it, it had only gone down a few percent. This is indeed a good battery. I think it might be safe to say you won't actually need to charge this phone every day, but of course that depends on how much you use it.
Pros:
- Brilliant performance and quality for the price.
- The screen was surprisingly good.
- The battery is pretty good at holding a charge.
- Ability to upgrade to Android's Ice-Cream Sandwich operating system later this year
Cons:
- Touch responsiveness was disappointing.
- Has a plastic feel which creeks when holding it.
- No front-facing camera.
- Cant "Pinch-to-zoom" in camera mode.
- Small keyboard for typing.
Verdict
The G300 might have a low-end smartphone look to it, but if you're not looking to spend too much or if you're new to smartphones and want to give them a try, purchase this phone. It has a very good performance and is quality for the price - a great starter to delve into the smartphone era.