Huawei Ideos X3 [Review]

FULL REVIEW

This is the age of smartphones, be it high-end or low-end there is a smartphone in almost every segment and that credit goes to Android. Then of course, there is a never ending battle amongst Android devices be it any category, hence I believe it is quite important to know these devices, especially in the entry level segment. Not long ago did Huawei launch its Ideos X3 smartphone in the Indian market, it is easy on your pocket, runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread and yes it has a few shortcomings. Let's find out what these are.

The device was first displayed at MWC last year however it took its sweet time to reach out hands. Over a period of about two weeks of testing the phone I realized there are some features which are really good and some features where Huawei should put more effort.

Design

The Ideos X3 is a well built smartphone. It does not look very appealing, however the company has used good quality plastic which helps provide a firm and comfortable grip. It is light, compact and easily slides into your pocket. It has the back, menu and search button right under the display. The good thing is that the buttons are pretty large, the bad thing is they aren’t backlit. It has a home button under the aforementioned buttons, it is a hard key which I believe is a good idea on small smartphone as it helps avoid accidentally pressing the home button while using a certain apps.

What I found very annoying about this phone is its battery cover which slightly creaks when pressed with just a little pressure. It does not stop the process on the phone or damage it, but just feels a bit annoying. It happens very often while you plug in the cable for charging the smartphone.

Display

It has a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen HVGA resolution display. It isn’t very responsive, and does not register all the swipes while scrolling through the homescreen and while scrolling vertically horizontally you may accidentally end up pressing something you didn’t want. So, it is isn’t very smooth as most of the new entry level smartphones. The HTC Explorer which is priced at INR 10,999 and even the Samsung Galaxy Y which is priced roughly INR 2,000 less than the Ideos X3 have much better touchscreen. Typing is also quite frustrating as the keys are a bit small and very close to each other, however the built-in spell check helps cope up with it.

Features and Software

The Ideos X3 is Android 2.3 Gingerbread based smartphone which offers a great deal of good features compared to Android 2.2 Froyo. The X3 has GPS capabilities, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. It has a 3.2 megapixel camera which takes decent images in sunlight, most of the images usually to have a high amount of noise and it has no flash so it is impossible to use it in the night. Surprisingly it has a front-facing camera which does allow you to make video calls.

Huawei has done some tweaking to the default Android interface, there are few animation options for homescreen transition and the apps drawer looks slightly different. However, the main change is the contacts integration, similar to HTC Huawei allows you to get all your contacts from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn right on your smartphone. It also has a Stream app which aggregates the feeds from these social networks in a single stream. There are a few other applications which are pre-loaded on this smartphone.

Cloud+

While Huawei’s add-ons do make the Ideos X3 an interesting phone there is yet another feature and it is the Cloud+ App. All users can set up an account for this application and use it store their music, videos or photos and it has a free space of 16GB for each user. You can access this data from anywhere and if you want to make some major changes then you can login at www.hicloud.com with your credentials and add or remove any required files.

This is not all, it also helps as a backup and restore tool and it has the Phone Finder service which lets you remotely lock or erase your phone, incase if its stolen or lost and hoping the person who found it has not yet switched it off.

Performance

The Huawei Ideos X3 has a 600 MHz single-core processor which is coupled with 256MB of RAM so don’t expect hardcore performance. It is does run most of the basic applications, but it is not well suited for graphic intensive apps and the web browsing experience is not the same as the high-end Androids. It is not very fast but it performs justifiably.

There is nothing superior about the call quality, it's as as good as any low-end Android smartphone and the battery life quite reasonable for an Android device as it goes up for a day and a half with moderate usage.

Verdict

We're not very pleased with the phone it's clear after using this phone for a while that Huawei is a force to reckon with in the smartphone market - the company seems quite focused on offering unique devices with a quality experience. The inclusion of the Cloud+ app and the effort taken to modify the Android interface is commendable. The Huawei Ideos X3 does lack in performance, but it also stands out. With a price cut to around Rs. 8,000, the X3 would be very much in the game.