Huawei Ascend G620S review

At 2000mAh, the Huawei Ascend G620S's battery is worryingly small. In fact, it's smaller than the juice in most of its rivals, including the Moto G (2014), the Sony Xperia M2 Aqua, and the Asus Zenfone 5.

Having said that, it performed well in TechRadar's 90 minute video test, where we run a video at full screen brightness and see how far the juice drops. The G620S's battery dropped 23%, which is the same as the original Moto G, and slightly better than the Moto G (2014), which lost 26%. The Asus Zenfone 5 and Sony Xperia M2 Aqua marginally beat it, though, with 22% and 20% drops.

This proves that the Huawei Ascend G620S doesn't have the best battery life, even within its price range, but it doesn't have the worst, either.

For example, after more than 15 hours of mixed use, with a few brief calls, half an hour spent playing a game and a lot of on-screen time for apps and internet, battery dropped to 19%.

I'd say my usage that day was moderate to high, so you should get a day out of it, but as with so many phones you'll want to plug in at night.

If you need to get longer out of it, there are a few tools at your disposal. For one thing, you can switch between three different power plans. There's 'Normal', which is, well, normal (though it does claim to slightly adjust the CPU and network usage to maximise performance).

Then there's 'Smart', which automatically adjusts the CPU and network usage for balanced performance. Finally there's 'Ultra Power Saving', which estimates it can double the battery life, but does so by only allowing you access to call and messaging functions.

If you want more control, you can also head to the power monitoring screen, where it will detect possible issues affecting your battery life, from screen timeout to auto-sync. Another screen highlights the most power intensive apps running on the phone, so you can easily see what's causing the biggest drain.

I was quite impressed by the number of built-in tools at my disposal, but I'd trade them all for a bigger battery. If you're into carrying a spare you're out of luck here as the juice pack is firmly sealed in.

The essentials

My house isn't far from being a dead-zone for phone signal, but while many phones I've tested, including my day-to-day HTC One, manage to at least have a small amount of signal, the Huawei Ascend G620S would often lose signal.

At least several times a day I'd notice that there was no signal, and presumably it also happened when I wasn't using the phone. Thankfully I don't think I missed any calls as a result, nor were any cut off part way through.

In fact, people I did speak to came through loud and clear, and the signal problems were only an issue in areas of poor reception. So if you don't live in a well-disguised lead bunker like me, you shouldn't have much trouble.

Actually calling people is handled well, too. The phone supports smart dialling, and the contacts list is easy to populate, allowing you to fill it with pre-existing contacts from Facebook, WhatsApp and Google. You can merge duplicate contacts at the push of a button and easily filter contacts by groups as well.

Messaging is a little less impressive, simply because Huawei's app is at best bland and at worst ugly, but you can easily replace it with something from Google Play. At least the keyboard works pretty well, with Swype and the Google Keyboard included.

For better or worse, there are a bunch of apps installed off the bat, including Facebook, Twitter, Kingsoft Office, and numerous Huawei offerings for everything from note taking to storage cleaning.

It all feels a bit bloated to me, but if you want a phone that has the apps you need out of the box, then the Huawei Ascend G620S should do the trick, and some of the apps can be uninstalled if you don't want them.

Among the wealth of apps, you'll find Google Chrome and Huawei's own browser. I'd always opt for Chrome, but the two browsers are functionally similar and web browsing is an enjoyable experience on the Ascend G620S's expansive screen. The only criticism is that text could be a little sharper.

Media

As the Huawei Ascend G620S has such a large screen, it's likely to appeal for media use. While I've covered the gaming performance and screen quality elsewhere, I should mention that a number of the pre-installed apps are media ones. These include an FM radio, various Google Media apps such as Play Movies and Play Music, and Huawei's own music and video apps.

These are fairly basic offerings, though, with Huawei's video player being part of its photo gallery app, and offering no real controls beyond play and pause.

The music player is at least a little better, allowing you to sort your library by artist or album and create playlists, as well as offering lock screen artwork and controls.

It also has a few equaliser settings you can tweak if you plug headphones in. You'll want to do this as the little built-in speaker on the back is rather tinny and not optimally positioned for use with games and movies.

The fact that there's only 8GB of built-in storage hurts its media potential, too. You'll definitely need to buy a microSD card if you want to game on the go.

Camera

The Huawei Ascend G620S seems to be going blow-for-blow with the Moto G (2014) in most of its specs, and the camera is no exception.

Both phones have 8MP snappers on the back and 2MP ones on the front. That rear camera then has the same megapixel count as the iPhone 6, but if proof were needed that megapixels aren't everything, a comparison between the Ascend G620S and the iPhone 6 would do the trick.

While you can get perfectly useable shots from Huawei's budget blower, there's nothing exceptional about them.

Still, it does have quite a few modes and options, from standard fare like HDR and panorama modes, through to a range of filters. It even has the ability to add a watermark or refocus a shot after taking it.

The interface is a bit busier than I'd like, with various camera options permanently on either side of the viewfinder. It would be nice if there was a way to hide these.

But actually taking photos is easy. You can either press an on-screen button or just tap on the screen, or even toggle the volume button to activate the shutter and take speedy pictures. There's also a flash, so it's useable in darker environments.

Close-ups are handled fairly well, with the subject typically coming out in focus, but the camera often struggled to capture some of the details, especially when there was a lot of one colour. This is evidenced below.

The camera seems less able to focus on scenes with lots going on. Photos become flooded with light in bright areas when they're not the main focus of the shot.

You can switch between 4:3 and 16:9 photos, though the latter is capped at 6MP. Pictures are often vivid, but at the expense of accurate colour replication.

Video recording options are a little more limited than photography ones, but you can change the quality and shoot in up to 1080p. Footage is useable, even if it struggles to stay in focus when panning the camera.