Huawei Ascend Mate 2 Review: Incredible Battery Life & Value

Display

As always, with all touch-only devices the display is one of the most critical aspects of the experience. A poor display can often make the experience worse, even frustrating. Things like poor viewing angles, poor color calibration, low peak brightness, high minimum brightness, and other flaws in the display are all potential areas where a display can fall short. In order to try and add a level of quantitative analysis, we turn to SpectraCal’s CalMAN 5 with a custom workflow to test our displays.

As always, before we get to colors, it’s important to cover the basics. In brightness and contrast, the Mate2 is great, there’s really nothing else to be said. While I’d like to see LCDs start hitting higher brightness levels (without RGBW subpixel layout), this is a great start compared to its competition. I also didn’t notice any issues with viewing angles, and while the pixel density is below 300 PPI, it's surprisingly acceptable.

Next up is grayscale. It's important to note here that these grayscale measurements were done with the i1 Pro, so the luminance values at the low end are usually inaccurate, thus the contrast won't agree with the i1Display Pro. Here things are still in line with most flagships today, but it’s still a bit disappointing to see that most OEMs favor higher maximum luminance over proper white balance. Like the Galaxy S5, some levels of gray have a noticeable green tint to them. Nokia and Sony are probably the ones to follow here by offering adjustable white point based on user preference. For a 300 dollar phone, this is a great showing.

In the saturation sweep, Huawei effectively puts many other OEMs to shame. While there’s a hint of saturation compression, this is a great calibration out of the box. The only notable issues are that the magenta saturations are a bit too blue, and that the yellows are shifted towards the green. This level of calibration is withing reach of Apple’s iPhones, the Nexus 5, and the One (M7).

Finally, the same trend is seen in the GMB ColorChecker. Huawei excels here, and is easily competitive with high-end phones. Overall, this is an extremely good display. It’s good enough to put some recent high-end smartphones to shame.