Huawei U8150 Ideos

Full Review

The Huawei U8150 Ideos is an affordable Android 2.2 (Froyo) smartphone with colorful swappable back covers. It’s the first smartphone from Huawei, a telecom solutions provider, in the Indian market.

Features

The Huawei U8150 Ideos joins the ever-growing budget Android smartphones segment in India. In terms of features, there is nothing to separate it from other affordable Android phones. The Ideos has a 2.8-inch capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 240x320 pixels and 256K color output. It also has a 3.15MP camera without flash that can also shoot videos in CIF resolution.

The Ideos is powered by  a 528MHz ARM11 processor and a dedicated Adreno 200 GPU. It comes with 200MB of internal storage expandable up to 32GB with microSD cards. The Ideos supports Wi-Fi and 3G (HSDPA 7.2Mbps) and also has a built-in GPS chip that uses Google Maps for navigation.

Since the Ideos runs Android, it supports the whole gamut of Google Mobile Services including Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar and YouTube.

Design & Usability

From the front, the Huawei U8150 Ideos looks like a run of the mill touchscreen phone with a workmanlike design that flirts with stylishness. A neat addition is the changeable back covers (only one of which is included with the phone) each of which is in a bright color. This definitely sets the Ideos apart from the more boring touchscreen phones in the market.

While the idea of swappable back covers is neat and adds a refreshing design quotient, the Ideos’ physical implementation of the idea is poor. Once removed, the back cover doesn’t fit well on the phone and constantly creaks when the phone is being used. It really feels awkward to use as a result and is responsible for a build quality that feels shoddy.

The Huawei has an average display that’s on par with what I expect from budget Android phones. It looks better than the Samsung Galaxy 5’s screen but is still not very good. Colors look dull on it and pictures, videos and even text don’t look sharp.

The Ideos comes with the stock Android 2.2 UI which by itself is perfectly fine as a UI when it comes to usability and simplicity. However, the Ideos doesn’t have the most responsive touchscreen- a problem that is further compounded by operational sluggishness. Thankfully, the keyboard (especially in landscape mode) is reasonably accurate. Huawei has given the Ideos a centre D-pad but I’d have preferred an optical trackpad or even a four-way D-pad. In its current state, all the centre D-pad is good for is serving as the camera button as you will hardly use it for anything else. I also missed a dedicated button to start the camera.



Browsing, Multimedia etc.

The Huawei U8150 Ideos uses the default Android browser so at least its feature-set is good. Unfortunately though, using the browser isn’t great thanks to the sub-par touch response and poor screen. Also, in spite of running Froyo, the browser doesn’t support Flash videos.

The Ideos is saddled with a bad 3.15MP camera that isn’t good enough for even casual shots. Images shot both indoors and outdoors look very hazy with very little detail (and consequently little noise). Videos are only marginally better but still shackled by choppy frame-rates and low resolution.


Images shot with the Ideos (click on images to enlarge in new window).

Listening to music on the Ideos is an average experience. It uses the default Android music player, so the interface is simple to use. Audio quality is okay but the phone lacks volume at least when listening to music through earphones. There are no sound enhancements, so there’s no way to tweak the way the music sounds. The external speaker though is quite good and sufficiently loud and clear. The Ideos also has an FM radio that works well.

Bottom Line

At Rs. 8,499, the Huawei U8150 Ideos is in direct competition with the Samsung Galaxy 5. While I would like to say that the Ideos is a good alternative for the Galaxy, that simply wouldn’t be true. The Samsung is better in terms of usability and has a better camera. The Ideos’ build quality, average touchscreen response and bad camera are to blame for keeping it down.