Huawei has earned a big name in the form of the Ascend G300, a phone launched back in the spring of 2012 exclusively through Vodafone in the UK. It offered a surprisingly well made phone with a decent 4″ display.

It quickly gained a huge following among those looking for decent Android smart phones.

Now Huawei’s looking to repeat the trick with the Ascend G330. It’s not an entirely new phone, but you get a faster, dual-core processor and a slight external changes in design that dumps the G300’s silvery style for a more traditional all black body.

Though people like this phone a lot because It has a nice structure which weighs less and Huawei doing a good job of making a 4″ display fit the hand well. It’s not what you’d call stylish, though, with Huawei seemingly intent on cloning the cheaper Samsung models of a couple of years ago.

Display:

The display is attractive though; It’s bright and sharp and offers the same 480×800 resolution as the old Ascend G300. Icon text is pretty clean and crisp, plus it’s perfectly usable outdoors if you dim the brightness even. It has sensors in the front to deactivate the display when you’re on a call, plus a sensor to adjust the display’s brightness automatically.

display

The G330 is a nice phone to hold. The rubberized back is gripper than the slippery silvery finish of the G300, making it feels a little more glued to your fingers.

The display’s solid, smooth and responsive, as are the three capacitive buttons, but it tends to creak a bit when you’re pressing the power and volume buttons.

Camera:

Huawei’s also geared up the camera spec by a factor of two, adding a front-facing camera along the top edge of the G330.

camera

You get a simple menu system that lets you select the white balance or activate a handful of useless image filters (negative, solarize, posterise and more), plus there’s the option to shoot single images of have the G330 attempt to build a composite panorama image.

Sim slot:

Android fans will be pleased to see a normal SIM slot and a micro-SD card hole beneath the G330’s back cover and it is easy to lever off, though, with even the most chewed of finger nails able to fit under the slot on the top edge and pop the case open. This phone is referred more for web browsing and using different apps.

Battery life:

Battery life is quite good we can manage to sail through a day of heavy Twitter and general app use, taking photos and fiddling with the phone non-stop as one tends to do to pass the time these days.

While I have mentioned a lot many pros of this smart phone, I may not forget to include the cons of this fascinating machine. Its creaky case often irritates its users though due to its bland plastic design.

Video recording:

And one more important thing is its poor video recording. The maximum video resolution is 864 x 480, which although pleasingly widescreen results in some blotchy and disappointing results, with the MP4 files lacking color and detail.

RAM:

One of the minor failings with the Huawei Ascend G330 is its relative lack of RAM at only 512MB. This means that the multitasking menu is often rendered a little useless, as the OS can’t keep too many apps running at once.

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The Ascend G330 isn’t quite the storming winner the original Ascend G300 was at its £99 price point, but it’s still one of the more capable budget Android models out there today.

It delivers a great smartphone experience for the money with hardly any obvious compromises.