Huawei Ascend P6: The best phone I had so far

[Bleipriester]

You say, you don´t want to have a China phone? Then do away with your iPhone or Galaxy.

Well, Huawei, mostly known for cheap smartphones, has also high-end phones. I just purchased a second hand Ascend P6 (like new, no scratches, etc) and it has some nice features, I would not want to miss anymore. While it is light and the thinnest smartphone I know (6,18 mm) it does not lack the power I need. It comes with an HiSilicon K3V2 1,5 Ghz quad core CPU that was developed by Huawei and has 16 core Vivante GC4000 GPU. This is not the fastest SoC but it serves my needs.
I would say, the 4,7 inch IPS display is very good. The 720x1280 pixels are enough and the maximum brightness of 365 Cd/m is outstanding. The colors and viewing angle stability are also good! When I remember the Galaxy SIII AMOLED display, I must say that the Ascend P6 is far better in this discipline. IPS is what Apple calls "Retina".

Special features:
1. Storage:
Android is very stupid sometimes. Apps can only be installed on the internal storage and when this storage is full, Android is paralyzed and can only tell you that it is full anymore. You can try to move the apps onto the external sd card but normally it does not work and you need root access and an app to do this. Especially with Android, 4.4, you can have some serious problems, when your storage is full. So, 8 GB, of which maximal 5 can be used in the Ascend P6 sounds very low but there is a realy good feature that allows you to make the sd card the internal storage:

2. Easy firmware update or downgrade:
If you want to offer the Google Play store on your smartphone, Google forces you to pre-install all the other Google apps, of which most are useless. I don´t need Google Mail, etc, so I uninstall most of them. I also uninstalled the Google Play Services as I did on my other Android smartphones. The app had no use to me and just drains the battery for nothing. I wasn´t aware of the fact that it is needed for the Play Store on this phone or Android 4.4 in general. So I could not get it from the Play Store. I downloaded some apks but they did not work properly, foced close, Play Store not working. Unfortunately, if you uninstall pre-installed apps, their apk files are also deleted from the recovery storage and the apps will not even be re-installed if you reset the phone to factory settings using the option in the settings or the recovery mode.
At this point you have to flash the firmware. With the Ascend P6 you can do this in the settings, that offers OTA, local and updates via USB. No need to change the bootloader or recovery mode, if it is an original firmware. I downloaded an original Huawei firmware, copied it to the sd card and applied it using the local feature. When it finished, all apps were back, I just updated the newly installed firmware usng the OTA feature, that allows to update directly from the phone´s internet connection.

Both features alone are a reason to get the P6 if you have difficulties to make a decision. Using this phone, you are treated like an adult, not like this guys:



3. Simple rooting:
The guys in the clips above are not allowed to decide what their phones do. If you want to uninstall pre-installed apps, move apps, decide which apps start with Android or do other operations that need permissions Android keeps for itself, you need to "root" your phone. But - depending on your phone - this can be an expensive procedure, require various tools and drivers.
Simply turn on USB debugging on your Ascend P6, launch the tool vroot, connect the phone to the PC and click root.

So, I am very happy with the phone.

 

[Bleipriester]

I just want to add two more features.

Firewall "lite":
A tool "networked apps" in the settings gives you control of which apps may access the internet with separated choices for W-LAN and mobile data.

Energy saving plan:
This option in the settings includes the option to decide which apps may keep running when the display has turned out.

 

[Bleipriester]

So that Huawei is now an established vendor in Germany, it is time to deal with the EMUI issue: The missing drawer.

There are three ways around and I will look at everyone:

Launchers:
At first, a Launcher is a replacement for the UI that is responsible for the homescreens. You can install one out of the many launchers that are available. But you have to review and test some until you find one that suits your needs. Most are full of ads and need in-app purchases to be fully functional. They can cause system failures, slow down the phone, consume your battery´s energy and spy on you. Although they offer a wide range of customization, the issues overweight.

Drawers:
Add a drawer to your EMUI homescreen with an app. I tried one and I could not decide whether an app will be shown on the homescreen or in the drawer. But I need to move and not copy apps to the drawer in order to make sense.

Hide apps:
Hiding apps is the best solution if you want to stick to Huawei´s fast and useful Launcher. I found the app "AppHider" which is capable to remove shortcuts from the homescreen. Apps hidden by the app are no longer directly available and must be launched via the app. Hide the apps you don´t need. Needs ROOT!

Note, this is really for crazy people only. All the others don´t care if they get 10 homescreens or create ugly folders everywhere.