Huawei Ascend G330

Huawei Ascend G-330




Under the hood Huawei has chosen to go with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Slightly behind the times, as Android 4.1 Jelly Bean is very much in the wild, it is still a pleasure to see this version of the OS in a budget phone. And Huawei has added a few tweaks of its own without obscuring Android’s own primal goodness. Huawei makes a bit too much of the fact that the BBC iPlayer app is pre-installed. It’s not particularly difficult to download this from the Play store onto other handsets. Perhaps people will be more impressed by EA Games’ Sims Freeplay, but here too we are  nonplussed.


To get to the game you have to pass a screen advertising trial versions of other EA games, and Sims Freeplay is also downloadable from Google Play.  What we do like is the inclusion of a DLNA app, file manager and All Backup which can be used to back up your SIM, contacts and other information.

There’s a flashlight app too, and you can get to this by long pressing the home button beneath the screen when you’re in the screen lock app. This is the one true innovation evident on the G330, and is
a feature we really like and would love to see other
manufacturers emulate.

It is easy to change the number of home screens on offer you can go between three and five, and a neat lockscreen gives you quick launch into the call
log, messaging and camera apps, as well as the ability to control music playback and that already noted torch feature.

Overall the Huawei Ascend G330 represents a reasonably effective update of the G300, but as we’ve seen with other landmark budget devices (like the famous Orange San Francisco), it is very difficult to pull off the same trick twice. With last year’s phone, any weaknesses were easily overlooked due to the handset’s incredible value.This time around, not so much. It’ll be fine for someone on a very limited budget, but it’s not a ground-breaking phone likely to grab any attention from the wider Android world.