Huawei Ascend Mate 7 Review

The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 is the LATEST flagship device from the Chinese manufacturer, but rather than replace the Ascend P7 it slides in ABOVE into the ever growing "phablet" market.

It's the NATURAL successor to the Ascend Mate 2, so you'd expect it to carry the number three at the end of its NAME, but Huawei is obviously looking to streamline its naming as it now was the G7, P7 and Mate 7.

In terms of price the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 starts at an surprisingly REASONABLE sounding 499 (around £400, $650, AU$690) for the 16GB internal storage, 2GB of RAM MODEL, with the choice of black or silver.

If you fancy doubling your internal storage to 32GB, and bumping the RAM up to 3GB, you'll have to part with 599 (around £480, $780, AU$830). Plus you'll be forced to have the Mate 7 in gold.

The good news is the Ascend Mate 7 is smaller than its 6.1-inch predecessor - the bad news though is the screen is still a whopping 6 inches in size. This certainly isn't a phone for the faint hearted, or small handed.

With such a large screen the Ascend Mate 7 has some distinguished competition, not least the recently announced Samsung Galaxy Note 4, as well as the Nokia Lumia 1520 and even the 5.5-inch LG G3.

The screen may only be a touch smaller than the Mate 2, but Huawei has done an impressive job of slimming down the bezels around the display of the Ascend Mate 7.

You'll notice they aren't quite as slim as the seem when you turn the screen on, as there's a black bezel surrounding it - but it still looks impressive.

In fact the screen accounts for 83% of the surface area of the front of the Ascend Mate 7, providing an impressive finish to the handset - putting it just above the 80% ratio of the Note 4.

This provides an impressive design and makes it ever so slightly easier to handle in one hand. With dimensions of 157 x 81 x 7.9mm its comfortable smaller than the 6-inch Lumia 1520 and 5.9-inch HTC One Max.

Compared to the Mate 2, the Ascend Mate 7 is 17% thinner and 10% lighter, tipping the scales at 185g - no bad for a handset sporting an aluminium unibody. The One Max was a weight 217g.

Pick it up and the Ascend Mate 7 does feel like a well crafted handset, and you do GET the sense that this is a premium product thanks to the cool metal against the palm.

In fact 95% of the body of the Mate 7 is metal, creating a STRONG, sturdy handset - while thin plastic strips run across the top and bottom of the device at the rear, under which are antenna.

Huawei has slightly curved the rear of the Mate 7, allowing it to fit a LITTLE more snugly into the hand, and I found that it was pretty comfortable to hold.

Sure it's big - too big for some - but I was still able to GET some ONE handed operation going without too much hassle.

A little shuffling was required to properly hit the metal POWER/lock and volume rocker buttons of the right side of the handset, but it wasn't too much trouble.

On the left side you'll find two trays, ONE which takes a microSIM and the other which can take either a microSD card, or a nanoSIM, making the Mate 2 a dual-SIM device.

Another bonus here is that both slots support 4G SIM-cards, so you'll BE able to take advantage of superfast data speeds on both tariffs.