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Battery life
The Hauwei Ascend P2 comes equipped with a non-removable 2420mAh battery, which may frustrate power users who won't be able to swap out a dead power pack for a fresh, fully charged one.
Huawei quotes that the Ascend P2 should last for 272 hours on 4G standby, and 286 hours for 3G standby, while it should give 767 minutes of 3G talktime.
These figures are always very best case scenarios and you'll probably never be able to match them in the real world, and that's certainly what we found during our time with the Ascend P2.
During the spells where we had our 3G SIM card in the handset we were able to eek out a whole days usage with the P2 without too much trouble, although it always needed a charge at the end of each day.
Swapping over to our 4G SIM and the battery life took a bit more of a battering, as with only relatively moderate usage we found ourselves dashing for the charger when it got to early evening.
If you're a heavy smartphone user then you'll need to make sure you have a back up power pack with you, or are always near a plug socket, as the Ascend P2 will eat through its battery at a rate of knots if you're doing a series of demanding tasks.
There is a power management section in the settings menu to try and help you eek out extra life from your Ascend P2, but this didn't seem to make a huge amount of difference - the best thing to do is turn off mobile data and stick screen brightness on low if you're running out of juice.
It's not the best battery life we've experienced at this end of the market with both the Galaxy S4 and HTC One offering up longer lasting solutions, although if you're careful you can get a whole day of the Ascend P2, which is pretty much standard for smartphones today.
Connectivity
We've already spoken about the superfast 4G capabilities of the Huawei Ascend P2 and that Cat 4 LTE technology is back up by Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and NFC.
There's also a microUSB port on top of the device which is used for charging the Ascend P2 as well as connecting to your computer.
You can even use the P2 as a portable internet hotspot, allowing you to share its superfast 4G connection with other devices such as laptops and tablets - although you'll want to keep an eye on your data usage to make sure you don't go over your limit and rack up a huge bill.
So all in all there's plenty of options to get your Ascend P2 connected to your various other devices, and the P2's 16GB of internal storage puts it at least on par against some of its rivals.
There's no microSD slot, but the inclusion of DLNA support means you're able to wirelessly stream media such as photos and movies to other compatible devices such as game consoles and laptops.
It's easy to share your content too, with quick links to the DLNA system as well as Wi-Fi and co. in the gallery, plus the DLNA app makes sharing media an easy and intuitive experience.
The quick settings in the pull down notification bar means it's easy to toggle key connections without having to dive into the full blown settings menu - although once again this isn't anything new and is available on a number of different Android smartphones.
