V3 got some hands-on time with the Huawei Vision smartphone, which was launched last night as the firm tries to grow its brand and presence in the market.

To start with the phone will be available from Phones 4U on a £25 per month contract which includes the handset for free. Huawei said that the Vision will be available in time for Christmas.

The phone has quite a sleek design with a unibody aluminium shell in keeping with rivals such as HTC. Three colours will be available: silver, rose gold or charcoal.

In design, the Vision is reminiscent of the Nexus S smartphone from Google with a similar shape and a curved screen, although the curve is not as noticeable.

We found the Vision comfortable to hold with its rounded shape. It's a nice size and weight coming in at 9.9mm and 121g.

For what will be a budget phone, the specs are quite reasonable. You get a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM and 2GB of internal storage. The storage can be expanded via the microSD card slot. We found performance to be good, and a respectable effort for a non-high-end phone.

It almost goes without saying that the Vision will come with connectivity such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3G, but there is no near field communication technology.

The Vision runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread like a lot of smartphones, but Huawei has added its own touch. The home panels can be viewed in a 3D carousel which can be controlled by normal swipe gestures or a scrolling bar.

We like the different approach and the carousel looks good and works well. If you leave the screen on one home panel you get animations of the widgets on that panel. Another addition is the ability to change the widgets on the fly and group apps in folders.

Pre-loaded apps will include Angry Birds, Asphalt 6: Adrenaline, Order & Chaos and
Guerilla Bob HD.

The screen is a decent 3.7in which is a good middle-of-the-road size. We found the screen nice and bright with good clarity. The one problem we did find was a lack of responsiveness, where a button push sometimes took a couple of attempts.

It was far too dark at the event to test the camera properly so we'll leave that for the full review. The specs are reasonable for a budget phone with a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera that is capable of recording video in 720p resolution.

Another thing we didn't have time to test was the battery. It's rated at 1,400mAh, which is a little lower than we normally find in smartphones but we'll reserve judgement until we test it properly.

Overall the phone could be successful if marketed correctly, and could be one of the best budget-friendly phones around. We look forward to getting the Vision in for a full test and review.

08 Nov 2011