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Huawei’s Ascend P6 is the thinnest mobile ever made, the Chinese company claims, having just officially announced the metallic Android phone at an event in London.
At 6.2mm that’s hard to argue, but this isn’t the high-spec, high-cost handset some were expecting. With a 4.7-inch 1,280×720-pixel screen it’s not as massive or as high-res as rivals such as the HTC One or Samsung Galaxy S4. It’s almost all screen, however, with very little of the front not taken up with pixels and glass.
I think it’s a really smart-looking device, with brushed-metal sides that are very reminiscent of the iPhone 5 (right down to the little plastic bands that split the antenna). SIM card and microSD slots are next to the volume rocker on the right-hand side. Unusually, the bottom is curved while the top is straight-edged.
It’s similar specs-wise to the Ascend P2, with a 1.5GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM, but making it thinner has meant cutting down the battery and removing 4G LTE capability.
The front-facing camera is almost as high-res as the one on the back, with 5 and 8 megapixels respectively for HD video all round.
There’s also only 8GB of total storage, and of course not all of that will be available. If it’s anything like Huawei’s budget Ascend Y300, it’ll have a separate partition for apps, so you won’t be able to use all the available space for games and widgets.
Huawei’s version of Android 4.2 Jelly Bean is also odd in that there’s no app menu — you have to have your apps on a homescreen, so you have to remember where you’ve put them all.
Here’s a promo video from Huawei:
My street-smart colleague Luke Westaway has been hands-on with the P6 — you can read his informative and entertaining first take right here.
Available in black, white and a fetching pastel pink, the Huawei Ascend P6 will be out in July. Carphone Warehouse, O2, Amazon and TalkTalk will all be flogging it, and Huawei says it’ll be €449, which shakes out to about £380, although there’s no specific UK price yet. That’s significantly less than the £500+ HTC One and Galaxy S4, but it’s hardly a bargain.
What do you make of the P6? Give your initial thoughts down in the comments, or on our infinitesimally thin Facebook page.
Update: A previous version of this story stated that the P6’s back is plastic. That’s not the case, it’s metal.
