Huawei Blaze review

An Android 2.3.4 smartphone, unsubsidised, for £99. Bargain?

Huawei Blaze
Stylish and functional for a cheap Android smartphone, but with a few glitches

Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

Huawei blaze

The Huawei Blaze is good for mobile connectivity up to the 3G HSDPA standard, also containing Bluetooth 2.1 with a2DP support for linking it to Bluetooth headsets and headphones.

Battery life on the Huawei Blaze was a bit of a disappointment. Coming with Android 2.3 and a modest 3.2-inch screen, we were hoping the Huawei Blaze might have been a long-laster, but the phone's small 1200mAh battery means you'll struggle to make it last a full day.

Huawei blaze

Huawei's social networking widget seems to be the culprit, which appears to almost continually search for status updates. Kill this off on day one and the phone will last a bit longer, but it's no star performer.

We also found the smartphone had a rather weak Wi-Fi connection. Where we'd usually expect to see a two or three bar signal around the house, we often only had one bar on the Huawei Blaze.

The connection never died or dropped as a result, though, so maybe this is just a peculiarity of how Huawei calculates signal strength.

You do get Wi-Fi support for b/g/n wireless networks, so if you need 802.11n there's one small patch of weak good news.

Huawei blaze

Coming with a recent version of Android means you get excellent tethering options, with the Huawei Blaze able to act as both a wired modem via USB and a Wi-Fi hotspot for hooking a laptop up to the mobile network.