EE Hawk announced with fast 4G and a low price

EE has unveiled the Hawk, a phone that seems built around speed, as the network is highlighting its CAT 6 capabilities. That means it theoretically supports 4G speeds of up to 300Mbps – and it has reached 238Mbps on EE's network at Wembley Stadium.

Most of the time you won't get speeds close to that, but it does mean the EE Hawk should be more future-proofed in one way than some budget phones. 

With a price tag of £149.99 (or from £14.99 per month on contract) this most definitely is a budget phone, especially as you also get a pair of JBL headphones thrown in.

So what else do you get for your money? Well, the EE Hawk has a 5-inch 720 x 1280 screen, 1.5GHz MediaTek 6750 octa-core chipset, 2GB of RAM, 13MP rear camera, 8MP front-facing camera, 16GB of storage and a microSD slot.

It also has a 2,500mAh battery that EE reckons will see you through 10 hours of use, a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, NFC, and runs Android 7.1.

Pixel-like design

What’s perhaps more interesting is the design, as the EE Hawk features toughened Gorilla Glass on both the front and back, and from the front it looks a lot like the original Google Pixel

That includes the Pixel's large bezels, but bezels aside it looks to have a more premium finish than some sub-£200 phones.

The Hawk also supports both Wi-Fi Calling and 4G Calling, so you should be able to make the most of EE’s network, and it’s out on December 1.

Whether it will be worth buying, we can’t say, but EE's own-brand phones such as the EE Harrier and EE Kestrel have generally been fairly accomplished, though we were less impressed by the EE Rook.

James Rogerson

James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.