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Connectivity
The Ascend P1 comes with your usual smartphone connectivity options, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth onboard, full 3G compatibility and Wi-Fi Direct for easy setup, along with an FM radio for stealing music through the air waves.
One thing it's missing in comparison with other high-end Android models is NFC support, but we doubt that's a huge deal for most buyers right now.
As there's no HDMI output on the Ascend P1, media sharing is handled via the company's own DLNA app, which also adds a simple DLNA option within the Android sharing menu, making it super easy to ping files to friends hanging out on the same wireless network.
The easiest way to get your stuff off the P1 is through Android's excellent sharing menu, which lets you ping everything, anywhere.
Images, web pages, videos and the rest of your mobile data can be sent out via any email accounts you have on the phone, through your Twitter feed, dumped on Facebook or Google+, with Google's mobile OS making sharing stuff a breeze.
If you're worried about the P1 hoovering up too much mobile data, Android 4.0 comes with a useful Data Usage app, complete with a nice little graph to illustrate your data consumption and an automated warning for when you get close to your limit.
This can even be set to monitor Wi-Fi use, if you're also on a limited home bundle.
Google's Talk chat app is part of the P1's Android suite, plus there's a voice dialler that supposedly lets you ring your contacts without fuss, although the voice recognition here seems particularly poor.
The instruction "call home" resulted in the voice dialler thinking we wanted to "Open date and time settings" for example. Won't be using that again.
Battery Life
We found the Ascend P1 to be a good performer in terms of stay-working-ability.
The phone and its integrated 1,800mAh battery made it through a day of moderate use very well, a day that consisted of leaving the email app to sync every 30 minutes, the usual Twitter chores, plenty of photography and some general fiddling, plus even the odd call and text message.
It's up there with the best in terms of battery life.
