Huawei Ascend G330 review

A worthy successor for the popular G300?

Huawei Ascend G330 review
Great Value
Huawei's budget blower gets a bit of an upgrade

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Huawei's stuck its own music player on here, which it calls Music+. It's a pleasant enough thing, coming with a large home screen widget that pulls in album art, plus lock screen controls for easily skipping the more tedious of album tracks.

Huawei Ascend G330 review

Playlist support doesn't deviate from the Android norm, with Huawei's player automatically generating playlists for recently added tracks and your most played tunes, also letting you sort them via any you've added as a Favourite.

This Favourite implementation is a bit odd. Instead of being able to "thumbs up" or "star" a track, faves are added by accessing the My Favourite tab, then scrolling through your library to find the ones you want to highlight - which is a bit cumbersome.

Of course, the first thing you ought to do is fire up Google's own Play Music app instead, which is also pre-loaded on the Ascend G330 and brings the joys of cloud storage and playback to Android.

It's a much prettier player too, offering a big graphical library, integrated shopping links that take you out to Google Play's music store and the option to cache music you may have stored within Google's cloud servers to the device for offline access.

One curiosity here is the way Google's Play Music app doesn't integrate with Huawei's own lock screen music controls, meaning there's an additional step (pulling down the Notifications menu) to skip tracks when using Google's Play Music app. And even then it only lets you skip forwards, not back. Odd.

Huawei Ascend G330 review

Video playback is a little disappointing. We couldn't get the G330 to play any of our usual review AVI files, with it only wanting to play MP4s out of the box.

That's easily fixed with a video player app download, though, so isn't a particularly sore point.