Huawei Ascend P1 review

Budget phone maker attempts to blag an upgrade to business class

Reviews
By
published
Huawei Ascend P1
Huawei isn't just focussed on the budget end of the market

Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

The Ascend P1 comes with a camera sensor rated at 8-megapixel power, with the phone producing some fine, sharp and detail-packed images.

And the video player captures 1080p footage as well, so you might want to stick a larger SD card in your basket when buying the thing.

Camera

Huawei Ascend P1 review

Huawei's made plenty of customisations to the standard, rather bland Android 4.0 camera app, and very nice it all is too.

A slide-out menu lets you add in piles of image effect filters, engage the oh-so-hilarious facial distortion tools, or get a little more technical with amendments to the white balance, ISO, exposure, saturation, contrast and brightness.

Huawei Ascend P1 review

As well as the useless negative and posterize filter effects you do get some decent retro options, which come in a few varieties and do indeed add some pleasing depth to the images.

Huawei Ascend P1 review

Even with no fiddling whatsoever, the Ascend P1 generates some cracking photos.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Detail is great on the 1836x3264 images, with little in the way of compression noise or artefacts.

Huawei Ascend P1 review

There's an HDR option in here, which does a nice job of boosting contrast and brightness, pulling out more in the way of detail from the shadows.

Click here to see the full resolution image

HDR is a bit of a pain to use as you need to hold the phone very, very still to avoid the images emerging blurry, so it's best saved for landscapes and exceptionally interesting clouds.

Huawei Ascend P1 review

Internal pics are still pretty good, although obviously not as vibrant as ones captured in clearer light.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Huawei Ascend P1 review

And there are plenty of comedy distortion effects to play with. How amusing. These work when recording video, too, if you can get your subject to stay relatively still so the sensor can lock onto the face.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Huawei Ascend P1 review

One taken with the retro Lomo filter activated. Forget the hipster connotations and you can't help but be impressed by the increased colour depth it generates.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Huawei Ascend P1 review

This is what you get from the front-facing chat camera, which manages decent shots at 720x1280 resolution.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Huawei Ascend P1 review

The burst mode is a bit of a disappointment, though.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Rather than capturing a sequence of shots and letting us suggest the best one as part of the previewing process, the P1 just dumps all the burst captures to its memory, leaving you to manually delete them all later, which takes some of the fun out of the burst-capturing scene.

Video

The 1080p video footage is excellent, but at around 200MB for a minute of video, you'd expect it to be. Moving water is captured with ease, details like hair and grass, which many other supposedly high-end mobile sensors gloss over even at 1080p resolution, look great when captured with the P1, plus the frame rate's solid and reliable.

Huawei Ascend P1 review

If we had to pick a hole in the video output it'd be a moan about the autofocus, which struggled on occasion to focus quickly. But for the most part it's a great camera to use across the board.

Gary Cutlack