The new $99 phone: Huawei’s Y100 reviewed

For the most part, Huawei has tried to provide a decent experience with the Y100, sticking with an Android overlay with a 3D rotating square effect every time you swipe to one of five possible homescreens.

Your application dock can be moved around quite easily, and it now resembles one closer to that of the iPhone, complete with small icon reflections. Even the scrolling app menu reminds us of iOS, as you scroll from left to right, with circles guide circled indicators appearing at the bottom of the screen.

Much like what we learned last year, you can make it look and feel more like an iPhone if you install a different Android overlay, like Espier.

Huawei’s choice of keyboard isn’t our favourite, and the overly large layout combined with the tiny screen makes for virtually no room when you’re typing. In fact, even with the large keys, you’ll often find yourself hitting the wrong letter, so we’d probably replace the on-screen keyboard with something else pronto.

Performance is a bit of a mixed bag with the Huawei Y100.

On the one hand, it’s cheap, so you probably don’t need to expect much grunt here. Playing Rovio’s uber-addictive “Angry Birds,” we had the title pause randomly and and even crash. Loading up the Google Play Store, we had a few slowdowns and longer wait times than we were used to, and there’s even some obvious performance issues with the keyboard, as it takes a second or two to appear on screen.

But then the performance surprises us, showing decent 3D graphics speed in “Fruit Ninja” and showing no lag when we’re doing basic things like swiping between the various homescreens, adding widgets, or searching through the menus.

In fact, Huawei has even taken out one of our performance indicators, with no live wallpaper support to be seen anywhere here, which is probably a wise move given how well they’d run on this limited hardware.

Memory is a touch limited, with less than 20 megabytes (yes, meg) available for you to use on the inside of the handset. There is a 2GB microSD in the box, and we’d suggest you throw that in immediately. Make sure to change the default installation path to the microSD in “application settings” otherwise you won’t have much room to download and install apps to from Google Play.

Huawei has been kind enough to include a camera in this handset, but we wouldn’t be throwing away that little compact of yours anytime soon, as this one is just plain terrible.

With a three megapixel resolution with no flash and VGA video, the camera module certainly hasn’t budged from last year, and it still produces pretty weak images. There’s still no auto-focus here, so we wouldn’t be relying on this as a replacement camera, not like we can with some of the high-end smartphones.

Battery performance is about average for the handset, with a rough life of a day if you’re not making phone calls the entire time, or chatting up friends over social networking and surfing the web.

Currently, the Huawei Y100 is exclusive (and locked) to Vodafone, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see this released to other carriers in the near future.

Conclusion

It’s hard to beat a handset for $99, and the Huawei Ascend Y100 could prove to be a decent smartphone for anyone after a cheap net-capable mobile handset, but it’s certainly not going to steal the crown from Apple’s iPhone or Samsung’s Galaxy S3 any time soon.