IT Pro Verdict

The U8510 Blaze is remarkably cheap, but it’s also surprisingly cheerful and Huawei has done a good job of delivering a relatively capable Android smartphone for very little money. It’s probably only suited as a main smartphone for undemanding users, but the very low price still makes it ideal for a host of other purposes.

By Julian Prokaza

Published 18 January 2012 In Reviews

The comparatively small screen has a correspondingly low resolution, but we have no complaints about its quality it's bright and the small pixels keep things crisp, and is generally responsive beneath a fingertip (though more on this later). The screen is also dramatically better than the 320 x 240 one on the similarly specified (but considerably more expensive) Samsung Galaxy Pro.

Huawei has also done a much better job than Samsung at cramming the Android UI into so few pixels, and the five Home screens remain clear and navigable, even when filled with app icons and widgets. Web pages don't suffer unduly either, since the Android Gingerbread browser does a good job of reformatting magnified columns of text to fit the screen width and, unlike the Samsung Galaxy Pro, the multi-touch display supports the usual double-tap and pinch zoom gestures.

The only real screen size-related grumble is that since the display is only 45mm wide, the Android on-screen Qwerty keyboard can be a little fiddly to use, but there is an option to switch to a taller version with larger keys. Otherwise, the Blaze can be used in landscape orientation to give a more comfortably sized keyboard for typing longer chunks of text and, of course, other third-party Android keyboards can always be installed.

As hinted at earlier, the Blaze's 600MHz ARM11 processor isn't always able to keep the Android UI moving fluidly beneath a fingertip, but it doesn't seem particularly slow otherwise. The chip isn't powerful enough to run Flash, but it has no difficulty in playing YouTube videos smoothly.