Huawei announces gigantic 'phone': the Ascend Mate

Huawei announces gigantic 'phone': the Ascend Mate
It's big. It's REALLY big.

Huawei has popped out another new Android phone...but this one borders on the ridiculous.

The Ascend Mate is a 'phone' in the loosest sense of the word, given it packs a 6.1-inch HD screen, which takes up a good 73 per cent of the front of the phone to give a more edge-to-edge display.

It comes with a stonking 4050mAh battery to fire all those pixels, and apes Nokia with Magic Touch, allowing you to use the phone through gloves. And continuing with a very familiar set of features: there are pop up windows that float over your current app, so calculations and notes are possible in a similar manner to the Samsung Galaxy Note 2.

Power control is handled by something cleverly named 'Quick Power Control', which Huawei claims can cut 10 per cent of power through smart connection management.

Who needs a camera?

Running Android 4.1 on top of Huawei's Hi-Silicon 1.5 GHz quad-core processor, the phone is packing some serious heat to allow you to swoosh and swipe to your heart's content.

We would say it's odd that it only has an 8MP camera, but in reality given it's more of a tablet than a phone, we can't see this replacing a compact camera for many.

The battery will apparently happily last two days on a single charge thanks to some clever power management that keeps your signal going only when necessary, while increasing your signal strength by up to 30%.

There's no Ascend Mate price as yet, but we do have a release date: the Ascend Mate will land globally in March.

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief


Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.