Hands on: Huawei Ascend G330 review

The Huawei Ascend G330 is a fairly uninspiring phone, but is designed to appeal to those that want to spend only a little on a smartphone. These people may want something more than a £70 effort from the bargain bin, but won't break the bank.

Which makes the G330 a little bit of an oddity, especially when compared to the barnstorming Ascend G300 predecessor, which rightly holds its place in our top mobile phones list.

When it was first announced the G330 was touted at being around 60% more than the G300 – although the specs have been given a boost to compensate - but the Chinese firm now expects it to land at around £100 SIM-free.

This means we're looking at a dual-core 1GHz processor, a 5MP camera and Ice Cream Sandwich on board as standard.

It's also rocking a nice 512MB of RAM to help out that meatier CPU, and also packs 4GB of internal storageand a 1,500mAh battery.

But enough of the internals – what's the phone actually like in the hand? The same 'uninspiring' term pops up again here, as it's got some fairly cheap (if acceptable) chassis effects.

The plastic shell feels OK in the hand, the top-placed power and lock button is easy enough to hit (although could do with a little more travel) and the three soft keys to control the Android 4.0 OS are pleasant enough to hit.

There's also a slight attempt at an overlay here, although it's not the fancy-pants Emotion UI that we're going to be getting on the more impressive Huawei handsets.

The Ascend G330 allows you to control some of the connectivity elements from the pull-down notification bar, which we're a big fan of as it's much easier to pop on Bluetooth or turn off mobile data this way.

Early Verdict

We're not sure how we would recommend this phone. It reminds us of the ZTE Grand X, which is a misplaced handset if ever we saw one.

It's going to be fighting with the likes of the HTC Desire C, and that's not a fight you'd want to enter into with the might of the name and Sense UI on board.

Some people might like the fact most of the Ascend G330 is stock Android, as the Holo Theme is actually pretty cool. But for us, there's nothing to really write home about here – although we will be testing the gaming prowess Huawei is so proud of, thanks to the Adreno 200 GPU on offer.