Name: Ascend P1
Brand: Huawei

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Camera and video

The Ascend P1 comes with a camera sensor rated at 8-megapixel power, with the phone producing some fine, sharp and detail-packed images.

And the video player captures 1080p footage as well, so you might want to stick a larger SD card in your basket when buying the thing.

Camera

Huawei's made plenty of customisations to the standard, rather bland Android 4.0 camera app, and very nice it all is too.

A slide-out menu lets you add in piles of image effect filters, engage the oh-so-hilarious facial distortion tools, or get a little more technical with amendments to the white balance, ISO, exposure, saturation, contrast and brightness.

As well as the useless negative and posterize filter effects you do get some decent retro options, which come in a few varieties and do indeed add some pleasing depth to the images.

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Detail is great on the 1836x3264 images, with little in the way of compression noise or artefacts.

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HDR is a bit of a pain to use as you need to hold the phone very, very still to avoid the images emerging blurry, so it's best saved for landscapes and exceptionally interesting clouds.

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Rather than capturing a sequence of shots and letting us suggest the best one as part of the previewing process, the P1 just dumps all the burst captures to its memory, leaving you to manually delete them all later, which takes some of the fun out of the burst-capturing scene.

Video

The 1080p video footage is excellent, but at around 200MB for a minute of video, you'd expect it to be. Moving water is captured with ease, details like hair and grass, which many other supposedly high-end mobile sensors gloss over even at 1080p resolution, look great when captured with the P1, plus the frame rate's solid and reliable.

If we had to pick a hole in the video output it'd be a moan about the autofocus, which struggled on occasion to focus quickly. But for the most part it's a great camera to use across the board.