The Huawei Ascend G330 is a very good option for those who are in the market for a powerful Android phone, but don’t have a generous budget. The G330’s main advantages over the competition are its speedy dual-core processor and large and reasonably high-resolution screen.
Both these features make it a great handset for web browsing, playing games or watching movies. However, you will need to be prepared to put up with a few software bugs, which Huawei will hopefully fix with an update.
In the looks department, the G330 isn’t one of the most gorgeous phones around and the plasticky chassis makes the phone look a bit cheaper than it actually is. Nevertheless, the curved edges make it reasonably comfortable to hold and the slightly rubberised battery cover adds extra grip.
The standard 3.5mm headphone jack is placed at the top of the phone, while the micro-USB port is found at the bottom. The latter doesn’t support MHL, which means that unlike high-end devices you can’t send HDMI video.
The full-sized SIM card and micro SD slots are under the battery cover – it sits just above the battery slot and you actually have to remove the battery to get at it.
Still, it accepts cards of up to 32GB in size, allowing you to supplement the handset’s miserable 4GB of internal storage space. That’s a welcome feature that not all phones have (I’m looking at you Nexus 4, HTC One X/+ and iPhone 5).
I was hoping Huawei might have loaded 4.1 Jelly Bean on to this phone, but unfortunately you only get a tweaked version of Ice Cream Sandwich. This is a shame – Jelly Bean is so much smoother and faster to use than Ice Cream Sandwich, thanks to the changes Google made under the surface to speed up the user interface and make it more responsive.
The G330 runs on a 1GHz dual-core chip with 512MB RAM. Its performance is not amazing and you’ll experience a few random stutters and pauses where it seemingly doesn’t want to react to touch input.
Also, when you exit some apps, there’s a notable pause as it redraws shortcuts and widgets that you’ve got sitting on your home screen.
Still, the G330 is faster than its price would suggest. Where the G330 doesn’t deliver is its battery life. The phone uses a 1,500mAh removable battery, which seems to be a little underpowered for the demand the dual-core processor places on it.
It struggles to get through a full day unless you use the special battery-saving mode that turns off a lot of the phone’s features such as background data, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
The G330 has a four-inch screen with a 480x800 pixels resolution.
For a budget mobile, the display is still top-notch – it’s sharp enough to comfortably read most text on websites without having to zoom in, and it also boasts good brightness levels and bold colours.
The G330 has front- and rear-facing cameras so you can use it for video calling.
Despite some usability and technical hitches, the G330’s camera produces colourful, detailed images.
Naturally you can also shoot video with a maximum resolution of 864x480 pixels. The quality is pretty mediocre as it tends to drop a lot of detail as you pan around a scene. It’s slightly annoying that the G330’s battery life isn’t better and that its software currently has some bugs.
However, the Ascend G330 is still a very good budget phone. For the same price, you’ll struggle to find another mobile phone with as fast a processor or as good a screen.
Jesmond Darmanin is a technology enthusiast who has his own blog at www.itnewsblog.com.