Huawei Vision

If you are familiar with Huawei, you probably know it as the brand that makes the cheap phones. Until now, the Huawei phones we've reviewed at CNET Australia have been all cheaply built plastic handsets, some of which we loved, but only because they are so ridiculously affordable.

The Vision breaks this mould with a much more attractive and sturdy design than previous Huawei handsets. The company opts for a unibody aluminium chassis for most of the phone's body, with a tri-tone battery cover like recent HTCs. Only the bottom third of this cover is removable, giving access to the 1400mAh battery, SIM slot and microSD card slot, pre-loaded with 2GB of memory.

However, Huawei's most improved smartphone element is its display, with the 3.7-inch screen on the Vision far outpacing the screens on any in its budget Ideos range of phones. This screen is more like one you'd expect from HTC or Samsung, with a WVGA resolution, good colour and decent off-axis viewing angles. Most impressive is the curved glass over the LCD panel. This curve bulges slightly from left to right, following the line of your thumb as you swipe between home screens. Huawei says it takes 17 hours to curve each piece of glass, which is an amazing titbit, resulting in a somewhat smoother touchscreen experience.

Keeping a smartphone to a price under AU$300 is remarkable when you consider the build quality described above, and even more so when you add a number of software costs into the equation. To give the Vision a first-class user experience, Huawei has licensed a number of third-party apps to enhance the phone's look and feel. Most notable is the SPB 3D launcher; a slick-looking home screen replacement that sits on top of Android. With SPB 3D, you get seven customisable home screens, plus a bunch of great-looking widgets. It's not quite as polished as HTC's Sense UI, but it is very close, and it has a number of similar elements to Sense, including great-looking weather presentation.

The onscreen-typing experience is also improved by an app called TouchPal, which features excellent early word prediction and some other really nifty typing features. If TouchPal or SPB 3D don't work for you, both are easy to switch off, leaving you with Google's default Android Gingerbread experience.

Powering the 3D home screens is a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and 512MB of RAM. This chipset also includes an Adreno 205 graphics processor, which is evident when we ran the Neocore 3D benchmark with the Vision and saw a result of 59 frames per second — a score on par with most of this year's biggest releases.

The Snapdragon chipset is the same option taken by manufacturers for last year's favourite phones, including the Desire HD and this year's Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc. Again, you can see how this processor stacks up in a comparison of benchmark results.

If there is one area where the Huawei Vision is not like its more expensive competition, it's in the quality of its 5-megapixel camera. This shooter is passable for spur-of-the-moment photos, but its autofocus is quite slow, and its colour reproduction skews the palette of most images towards being bluer than they naturally are. It is a fair bit better than cameras we've seen from Huawei in the past, but it's a good step short of the competition this year.