Introduction and design

It's rare to see a budget handset that seems to check nearly all of the boxes for quality features, which is why we were initially so surprised by the LG Escape. It might not turn heads with dramatic styling, but the Android 4.1: Jelly Bean device delivers strong OS performance, a sharp screen, and a nicely slim build, all backed by AT&T's 4G LTE network.

We weren't terribly surprised to see a mediocre camera included, but still felt like the Escape was better than it really should be for the price. And then we found the near-fatal flaw: A storage limitation that'll prevent users from downloading and using larger apps. For casual app and game dabblers, that may not be an issue, but what about everyone else?

Design

While the glossy plastic backing may turn some off, the shape and size of the LG Escape makes the handset feel great in the hand. Measuring 4.96-inches by 2.54-inches, with a thickness of just 0.37-inches and a weight of 4.5 ounces, the phone is quite slim, and the design feels well considered without being flashy or eye-catching.

The 4.3-inch display comes in at a resolution of 960 x 540 and looks quite good, with crisp text and vibrant colors. Above the screen are glossy silver AT&T and LG logos, along with a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, while the bottom houses the soft touch buttons: Back, home, and menu.

We mentioned the back of the phone earlier, as the slightly slippery smooth plastic backing won't be everyone's cup of tea, especially with the reflective checkerboard design. Despite its glossy nature, it fits well with the design of the device, though the large etched LG logo is a bit much. Above the logo is the primary 5-megapixel camera lens, while a small opening for the speaker is found near the bottom left.

The sides, top, and bottom of the phone are also made of black plastic, albeit with a ridged design that almost makes it look like it's rubberized. You'll find a power button on the upper right, a volume rocker on the upper left, and a headphone jack up top. The micro USB port is located dead center on the bottom of the phone.

Powering the LG Escape's zippy performance is a dual-core 1.2Ghz processor backed by 1GB RAM, and the result is speedy movement around the OS, quick transitions between menus and apps, and notable games running smoothly and without slowdown issues.

The storage issue is a huge disappointment, though. The Escape only comes with 4GB of internal storage, a good chunk of which is taken up by Android and various preloaded apps. Less than 2GB is actually available for your use, though the Escape supports microSD cards of up to 32GB in size.

None of that would be a huge issue for a budget device if apps could be installed or moved to the external storage, but that's not the case. Advanced users might be able to root the device and find a workaround, but the average user will simply be unable to download larger apps and games – really anything larger than a few hundred MB, as you'll need enough space to both download and install an app.

We simply can't figure out why LG would cripple its handset in such a way. Even the much-lower-end LG Venice on Boost Mobile lets you install apps to the microSD card, and that's half the phone the Escape is in many other regards.

Price is one of the biggest perks of the LG Escape, as the device can be had for just $0.99 with a two-year agreement. For AT&T users that are willing to sign a new contract but don't want to make a big upfront commitment, the Escape has several highlights, plus it's an LTE device with Jelly Bean that'll only cost you a buck on day one. But that storage issue can't be ignored.

Interface, calling, and Internet

Interface

The LG Escape runs Android 4.1: Jelly Bean, and while it's not the absolute latest and greatest that the operating system has to offer, it's still relatively recent and runs well on the device. The experience here is mostly stock Android, and aspects like calling, email, and messaging will all seem pretty familiar for veterans of the OS.

LG's UI tweaks only seem to help, rather than hinder. We're fans of the customizable lock screen shortcuts, which let you pick four apps for quick access. If you want the camera and email (or anything else) handy for immediate drag-to-open access, the Escape makes that possible.

Up to seven home screens can be customized with app shortcuts and widgets, and we really like the option to use different images for each page's backdrop. It adds a slick bit of customization and pop to the experience.

Calling

Calling and contacts are typical Android offerings on the LG Escape, and both are very straightforward and easy to use. Large number icons dominate the dialer screen, and it'll suggest numbers from your contacts that you might be trying to enter. Meanwhile, contacts can automatically pull your Google and Facebook contacts, and it's very easy to merge duplicate entries. Favorites and groups can also be assigned as desired.

AT&T's 4G LTE service was very good and consistently reliable in our testing. We picked up bits of static here and there, but otherwise had quality results in what we heard from those on the other line, while those we spoke with reported clear-sounding voice on the other end. Speakerphone quality was likewise solid on both ends.

Internet

The stock Internet browser on the LG Escape includes an AT&T-specific modification: a browser bar at the bottom of the screen that includes quick access to bookmarks and such via little icons. It hides away when not in use and isn't terribly obtrusive, but it's also easily disabled in the options. Otherwise, the browser will be familiar to Android users, and other options (including the excellent Chrome) are available via Google Play.

Surfing the web and downloading apps and media was a nothing but a delight on AT&T's 4G LTE network. We regularly clocked download speeds in the range of 12-17Mbps with upload speeds closer to 11-14Mbps. Your mileage may vary based on location, of course, and we've seen higher results on the top end on Verizon handsets. However, the speeds here did not disappoint in use.

Camera and video

Here's where the budget part of the equation most notably comes into play. The LG Escape sports a 5-megapixel rear camera, which is definitely on the lower end of the scale for modern smartphones.

We recently reviewed the LG Venice on Boost Mobile, which is a much weaker handset in terms of performance and appeal, but the results from its own 5MP camera are very similar to what we saw here. On a handset that otherwise outshines its lower-end pricing in most regards, this aspect is unfortunately dead on.

To be fair, it's not a bad camera for quick snapshots to post to Instagram or text or email to friends. For on-the-fly photos, it'll do the trick well enough. But for anything that you'd want to view on a screen much larger than 4.3 inches, the lower-quality shots will show their weaknesses, including lacking detail and notable graininess, especially in low-light and indoor settings.

The LG Escape also allows for 1080p video footage shot from its back camera, and while the footage we shot wasn't spectacularly detailed, the results are largely very good for a budget smartphone. However, for both still photos and videos, users who need a really stellar camera in their pocket at all times should consider a higher-end handset, as there are many better options in that regard.

As for the software, the same camera app is used for both still photos and video footage, with a quick tap on the lower right of the screen swapping between the two. It's an auto-focus lens for both needs, and you can easily modify aspects like image size, white balance, and geotagging via the options menu, as well as turn on color effects or a timer as needed.

Battery life, maps and apps

Battery Life

Considering its budget status, we weren't sure whether to expect long-lasting performance from the battery. Luckily, we were pleasantly surprised by the results from 2150 mAh removable, rechargeable battery, which is found beneath the easily removed back cover of the device.

It's rated for eight hours of talk time, and in our testing – using the device for a mix of web browsing, email reading, use of apps and games, and light media streaming, we had little trouble getting a full day out of the device. And if you're a less-fervent handset user, it'll hold up well over multiple days. For a phone of this size and its power needs, the battery size seems just right, especially for the handset's price.

Maps and Apps

The LG Escape expectedly comes preloaded with Google Maps, which is the gold standard for mobile mapping and works admirably here throughout. It offers GPS-aided maps, directions for driving, walking, and public transportation, and can kick you to either Google's own Navigation app or the AT&T Navigator app for turn-by-turn navigation.

AT&T has preloaded the device with a few too many unnecessary apps, sadly, like AT&T FamilyMap, AT&T Code Scanner, and Mobile TV – all of which would have been better off as optional downloads. While these apps (and other AT&T ones) can't be deleted outright, they can be disabled and hidden from your apps listing.

Facebook and Twitter are already included on the Escape from the moment you pull it out of the box, but we suspect most users won't be too heartbroken about having those at the ready.

Otherwise, your destination for loading the device up with apps and games is Google Play, the stock Android marketplace, which also serves up access to movies, music, books, and more. While still not as robust a storefront as the iOS App Store, Google Play's app offerings are steadily improving, and there are plenty of free and paid options in both the apps and games realms. Most headline apps – like Netflix, Flipboard, and Instagram – are available, though the games selection is much more hit-or-miss compared to what's found on iOS devices.

Still, there are plenty of great games to be had, and thankfully performance is not an issue with the LG Escape. We tried an array of top games, including the likes of Angry Birds Star Wars, Jetpack Joyride, and Shadowgun DeadZone, and all ran very well without noticeable slowdown or visual degradation.

As noted earlier, however, there's no built-in way to install or move apps to the microSD card, leaving you just about 1.8GB of internal storage for both downloading and installing apps and games. Many top games weigh in at more than 1GB apiece, but you won't have enough space to both download the app and then support the install process. The LG Escape can run slick games, but can't actually store many of them. What a shame.

Verdict

So much about the budget-priced LG Escape impresses, from the sharp screen to the slim build, zippy performance, and AT&T 4G LTE network. We expected a lower-end camera in the mix, but the combination of limited onboard storage and no provided way to install apps to the microSD card really hobbles the device for the average user.

With that in mind, is the LG Escape still worth considering for certain folks?

We liked

Quality components make for a very stellar Android experience here. It runs Jelly Bean (Android 4.1), the 1.2Ghz processor is very snappy, the display is quite good, and the battery life is very solid for a budget device. All told, the phone is much nicer than its price might suggest.

The slim build of the LG Escape also feels great in the hand. While the glossy backing plate won't be for everyone, the proportions feel just right. AT&T's 4G LTE service also steadily impressed during testing, both with data usage and phone call quality.

We disliked

The storage issue is a major one, as the less-than-2GB actually available internally is the only space you'll have for apps and games. Anyone looking to play cutting edge, console-like games simply won't be able to in most cases. You won't have the space for the larger ones, and even if you tend towards smaller, casual games, you'll have to delete apps often to have enough free space handy.

Additionally, the 5-megapixel back camera is unremarkable, and while it'll take fair snapshots for quick sharing, we wouldn't recommend the Escape for anyone who makes mobile photography a priority. And while we like the feel of the device, the design is pretty simplistic and lacks a premium stylistic edge. That glossy back cover looks a bit cheap, for sure.

Final verdict

At first glance, the LG Escape seems like a sure thing for budget-minded buyers. It runs Android 4.1 extremely well, with a sharp screen, comfortable-feeling design, very solid battery life, and impressive 4G LTE service. For a device available for just a dollar with a two-year deal, it seems quite excellent in most respects.

But the storage problem is a deal-breaker, and a surprising one at that. We don't have an issue with a budget phone offering limited internal storage; we can drop $20 on a large microSD card. But the inability to install or move apps to the external storage means you'll never be able to snag larger apps unless LG addresses the limitation with an update.

For some, that might not be a huge concern. For many others, though, it'll be enough to dwarf the many positive features of the LG Escape, and it should push you to consider other devices – even if you need to shell out extra green upfront.

Introduction

So what's the world's fastest smartphone? The Samsung Galaxy S4? HTC One? iPhone 5? Wrong, wrong and wrong - if you're talking about mobile data speeds the Huawei Ascend P2 is the unlikely hero stealing the crown.

The reason the Ascend P2 lays claim to the world's fastest title is due to the Cat 4 LTE innards it sports, which can provide a theoretical speed of up too 150Mbps, but you're never going to actually see that.

With 4G baked inside the handset you can expect EE will be picking up the Ascend P2 pretty quickly in the UK, although we're yet to see any network commit to Huawei's latest flagship smartphone just yet.

You can pre-order the Huawei Ascend P2 with some online retailers, with the SIM-free handsets setting you back around £339.99 (around $530, AU$560), and we reckon this will probably translate into around £25 per month on a 3G contract.

Huawei has a bit of a reputation for being a budget phone merchant and the Ascend P2 is the Chinese firm's latest attempt at changing that assumption - and let's hope it does better than the Ascend P1 which arrived in stores with nothing more than a whimper.

In terms of competition the Ascend P2 doesn't enter at the top of the smartphone tree, with the likes of the Galaxy S4, iPhone 5 and Sony Xperia Z all offering a more premium - and expensive - experience.

The Huawei Ascend P2 will find itself rubbing shoulders with the mid-high level of handsets which include the Sony Xperia SP, Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini, Nokia Lumia 820 and even the Samsung Galaxy S3.

However it's also got one of its own kind to contender with too in the form of the Huawei Ascend P6 - a super-slim smartphone which may not have such a blockbuster camera, 4G connection or as large internal storage, but it does sport a far more attractive design and it's difficult to see how the Chinese firm will be able to market both successfully side by side.

On paper the Ascend P2 looks relatively good value for money with a 4.7-inch, 1280 x 720 display, 1.5GHz quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB internal memory, 13MP rear camera and front facing 1.3MP snapper.

Jelly Bean is the operating system of choice on board and along with the likes of 4G and NFC, Huawei has managed to make the Ascend P2 a compact 136 x 67 x 8.4mm, and the lightweight plastic body tips the scales at 122g.

In terms of design the Ascend P2 doesn't exactly break any new ground, but it's a relatively stylish, functional handset which sits reasonably well in the hand - although we found it offered little in the way of grip which lead us to worrying about dropping it, and sometimes actually dropping it. Whoops.

We're told though the back cover (which isn't removable by the way) on our review isn't the same as the one which will find its way onto the P2 which you'll be able to pick up from stores, so hopefully it will offer a bit more grip.

As you can't peel off the back cover there's no access to the 2420mAh battery housed inside the Ascend P2, which explains why the SIM-port is located on the right side of the handset under the easily accessible power/lock key.

The microSIM port itself is covered by a plastic flap which isn't too tricky to flip open, although popping your SIM in and out is more of a challenge and unless you have some decent length in your nails you'll need to use the little tool included in the box to manipulate the card.

An added bonus on the right hand side of the Ascend P2 is the inclusion of a dedicated shutter key towards the base of the handset, giving you instant access to the camera app as well as an easy way to snap photos.

Up top there's a headphone jack and a microUSB port, which keeps the bottom of the Huawei Ascend P2 clear for the sweeping black, glossy plastic finish.

On the left you get the customary volume rocker switch and moving round the back reveals a camera lens and single LED flash housed in a textured metal frame for a bit of added protection, plus there's a dual speaker grille near the bottom of the handset.

Available in both white and black the Huawei Ascend P2 is a solid, well built, if not slightly uninspiring handset which won't look out of place next to its competition.

Interface

The Huawei Ascend P2 comes running Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean and we'd expect it to get bumped up to Android 4.2 in due course.

It's not just stock Android which adorns the P2 though, with Huawei sticking its own gloss over the Google-made system, known as Emotion UI 1.5, which we've already had an encounter with on the Ascend G510.

At first glance the Emtion UI on the Ascend P2 looks pretty standard, with a slightly tweaked lockscreen providing quick links to the phone, messaging and camera apps.

Unlock the handset and you're taken to one of up to nine homescreens - although you can tailor the number displayed to suit your personal needs by pinching the screen.

The first major difference you'll notice on the Emotion UI is the main widget which dominates the main homescreen.

It appears to be several widgets, but hold down on any one of them and you'll notice it's on big widget with various components.

This multi-widget allows you to tailor its layout to suit you, with favourite contacts, weather, clock, music player and gallery options.

You can change the layout around and swap out some for different sized options - although you can't include any third party widgets in here, which makes it slightly limiting.

We also found this widget a little overpowering, taking up pretty much the whole screen and it seems like a bit of a waste of space. It's a nice idea but there's not enough options and the size is a real hindrance in our eyes.

Next up is the app draw, or more accurately, the lack of the app draw. Yep that's right, Huawei has completely removed the Android app draw from the Huawei Ascend P2, forcing you to have all your apps on your homescreens. It's all very iOS, don't you think?

Now we appreciate the reason why Huawei has done this. It's looking to simplify the Android experience and we're sure there's some people out there who get confused when they see the same app on a homescreen and in the app list - although this is confined to first time users.

For a seasoned Android user the Emotion UI is almost like using a totally new operating system as the normal functions of the app draw no longer exist - it's confusing, but we got used to it after a couple of days.

Thankfully things are a little more Android in others areas - take the notification bar for example. Drag your finger down and you'll be greeted with the standard Jelly Bean layout, although Huawei has added a row of welcome quick settings.

There's a decent selection of toggles here too, with the likes of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS lining up alongside rotation lock, brightness and airplane mode.

Scroll to the end of the line, hit more and you'll be able to re-order these settings to get your frequently used toggles at the front, plus there's a few more you can swap into the lineup.

Back to the homescreen and hold down on a clear area to pop up a menu which allows you to change the wallpaper, choose homescreen transitions and select a variety of widgets.

Because all your applications are stored on the homescreens you'll find they start to fill up - luckily a simple drag and drop of one app onto another will create a folder, allowing you to keep a tighter control on your downloads.

General operation on the Ascend P2 is pretty smooth, although it lacks the snappiness of other quad-core handsets such as the Galaxy S3.

The 4.7-inch display is crisp, clear and responsive which aided our navigation around the Ascend P2, although we found the Emotion UI did make Android look a little childish.

You can change the "theme" of the operating system by selecting the Theme app to make things look a little more professional, although we would have still preferred the stock Android look over any of the options on offer.

Huawei has looked to make Android more intuitive in other places as well - a visit to the Settings menu will give you the choice of two tabs at the top of the screen, "general" and "all".

"All" shows you the standard Android settings menu, but tap on General and you'll find Huawei has hand picked some bits it thinks you'll be using most often including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and screen brightness.

It does make finding what you want slightly easier, although we didn't have a big issue with the stock settings menu so this addition feels a little forced.

In short the Huawei Ascend P2 isn't going to blow you away with a super slick operating system and the Chinese firm's interpretation of Android is a little puzzling in places, but on the whole it's smooth and easy to use, if not a little babyish in style.

Contacts and calling

Contacts

Contacts are handled in the People app which gets a position in the dock at the bottom of the screen by default, but it can be swapped out for any other app.

Although the name and app icon are different, behind the scenes you've got the stock Android contact management system which has just been given a little bit of Huawei gloss on the Ascend P2.

Huawei hasn't taken it upon itself to build Facebook or Twitter integration into the Ascend P2 which means you won't be able to pull through all your buddies from the popular social networks - which in turn leaves your contact list looking very bland thanks to the absence of profile pictures.

Google doesn't provide this integration as standard, but the likes of Samsung, HTC and LG happily build in a bridge as part of their user interfaces to allow you to sync everyone and it's a shame Huawei has neglected to follow suit.

It has included the Favourite and Groups features on the Ascend P2 however, and the former will pull through your best buds from Google and display them in large tiles within a separate tab of the People app.

Groups are pretty straight forward as well, with the Huawei Ascend P2 scanning your Google account for any contact cards which may have been pulled together under a sub-heading, such as "Work" or "Family".

All your friends are displayed in the normal list, with a profile picture space to the right of their name.

You can add a contact easily by hitting the head with a plus icon in the bottom corner of the app, which will take you to a form so you can enter details about your new found friend.

It's a basic, easy to use interface which gives you all the core functionality, but none of the added extras you get on the likes of the Sony Xperia SP or Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini.

Calling

The Phone app is your one stop shop for all your calling needs, be it tapping out a number on the keyboard, quickly returning a call from your last dialled list of flicking through your contacts to the buddy you wish to converse with - it's all covered here.

Fire up the app and you're thrown into the dial pad tab, which doubles as your recent calls lists, with received, missed and dialled numbers appearing in the space above the numeric keypad.

There's smart dialling present so if you start tapping out some digits the Ascend P2 will start offering up suggestions based on numbers in your contact list - or if you tap 3, 2, 3 it will also offer up "Dad" - it's all very clever, but nothing we haven't seen before.

Of course you can also make a call by going via the people app, selecting the person you wish to speak to and then tap on their number within their contact card to get the phone ringing.

In terms of signal the Huawei Ascend P2 didn't have any problems finding and holding onto bars, never leaving us feeling cut off.

Call quality was more than acceptable and we could easily have a conversation in a relatively noisy environment without too much hassle, but we weren't blown away with crystal clear audio.

Messaging

Thanks to the Android Jelly Bean innards of the Huawei Ascend P2 you're blessed with a wealth of messaging options from email and text messages to social media.

First up is text messaging which is another of the apps which gets a default place in the app tray, allowing you to access it quickly from any homescreen.

Once again the difference within the app between Ascend P2 and stock Android is minor, providing you with a clean, intuitive allowing you to get texting right away.

That is until you hit the keyboard on the Ascend P2 which is possibly one of the most frustrating implementations we've come across.

The keys are too small and accuracy isn't up to scratch leading to numerous errors in even the shortest of missives.

We dived into the settings menu in search of next word prediction and auto-correct, and although the options seemed to be available, once enabled the keyboard didn't provide them.

You can flip the Ascend P2 90 degrees for a landscape keyboard, although it's not really that much better and it also means you lose sight of the message you're replying to.

Needless to say we quickly reverted to the stock Android board which is available on the Ascend P2 and our typing instantly improved, although after a while we buckled and downloaded SwiftKey.

There's a couple of email clients in the form of Email and Gmail - which are common place on any Android handset these days.

The Gmail app only allows you to deal with your Google Mail account, while over in Email you can any number of accounts in one unified inbox - including any Google orientated ones you may have.

Both are relatively similar in operation and you shouldn't have any trouble getting to grips with them, and the smooth operation of the Ascend P2 allows you to browse all your communications with ease.

Annoyingly, as with a lot of Android devices, viewing HTML emails isn't particularly easy as the Huawei Ascend P2 will not let you zoom all the way out to get an overview of the message.

This means you'll be doing a lot of horizontal as well as vertical scrolling to view some emails, which can get pretty frustrating after a while.

In terms of social media the Ascend P2 comes pre-installed with the official Facebook, Twitter and Google+ apps, allowing you to get online and chatting with your friends right from the word go.

Of course the Google Play store is just an app icon press away if you want to download other social mediums and the punchy quad-core processor inside the Ascend P2 means you'll be uploading photos and live messaging with ease.

Internet

The Huawei Ascend P2 comes touting the title of the "world's fastest smartphone" which relates directly to its Cat 4 LTE capabilities giving it theoretical speeds of up to 150Mbps over a mobile network.

While you won't get anywhere near that quoted top speed, you can expect to readily get 20-30Mbps over 4G, which is faster than some home broadband connections - although it may not be particularly obvious on the Ascend P2.

We tried out the Ascend P2 with our 3G O2 SIM-card and our 4G EE card, to see if it would live up to its superfast credentials.

Wi-Fi b/g/n is also on board for when you don't fancy eating through your monthly data allowance at a rate of knots, which is handy.

In terms of a web browser the Ascend P2 comes with two options - the stock Android offering alongside Chrome which has become a mainstay in the standard Jelly Bean setup.

The browsers are straight forward, no thrills offerings which will easily let you navigate to the pages you require with minimum fuss.

Browsing speed on the Huawei Ascend P2 was pretty good, but we weren't blown away with blisteringly fast load times and we didn't notice any improvement compared to the Samsung Galaxy S4 or iPhone 5.

The mobile version loaded in around four seconds over 4G, while the desktop version took around 15, although we were able to begin panning around after about nine seconds.

Over 3G the load times were only a second or so slower for mobile sites, but full versions of complex websites took considerably longer to appear on the Ascend P2.

On a decent Wi-Fi network the browser had a similar performance to that over 4G, and once pages had loaded we were able to scrolling through them smoothly.

The 4.7-inch display on the Ascend P2 may not be fully HD, but text and images appeared bright and crisp, making websites easy to consume without you having to strain your eyes.

Open up an article on a webpage and the text will automatically reflow to fit the screen, making it easier to read as you don't have to scroll sideways.

If the text is still too small you can zoom in and double tap the display which will reflow the text at its new size - it's simple, effective and we wish every handset offered this.

On-screen controls are pretty much absent, with just a URL bar and a button for tabbed browsing at the top of screen.

Hit the tabbed button in the stock browser and you'll get a vertical list of thumbnails showing your open tabs, with the option to close each one, or open more if you desire.

Tabs are easier to manage in Chrome, as they all appear at the top of the display, making for a much faster switching experience.

There's also a link to your bookmarks here, which sync with your Google account giving you access to all your favourite sites without having to navigate to each one manually.

All your other settings can be accessed by hitting the menu button below the screen, giving you access to your bookmarks, offline reading (not in Chrome) and sharing options.

Offline reading is also a useful feature, saving a web page to the device, allowing you to read it when you're out of signal - perfect for the train ride home or a jaunt into the country.

Of course you can always download another browser from Google Play in next to no time, so if you don't get on with the default options on the Ascend P2 it's not a big deal.

For all you flash fans out there it's more disappointment as the Ascend P2 doesn't support the dying format which Google itself is phasing out of its ecosystem, shutting down support from Android Jelly Bean onwards.

Camera

The Huawei Ascend P2 has been blessed with a decent 13MP camera on its rear complete with single-LED flash, which means it should be capable of taking some decent snaps.

Round the front you're furnished with a 1.3MP snapper for awkward video calls with your parents and the casual vanity check while on the train home - and it's nowhere near the 5MP option on the Ascend P6.

Huawei has also equipped the Ascend P2 which a physical shutter key on the right side of the handset, giving you a quick way of launching the camera app as well as an easier way to take photos.

The camera app hasn't escaped the Emotion UI overlay, but luckily it's not particularly oppressive, with a clean intuitive layout.

There are three quick tools on the right which allows you to switch between front and rear cameras, toggle the flash and an option to enable or disable the tap-to-focus function.

More options can be reach by tapping the down arrow which appears at the top of the screen (when held in portrait).

Here you get several menus including shooting mode which lets you choose from seven options including panorama, HDR, group and low light.

Next up is the filters option which includes favourites such as negative, sepia and emboss - all thrilling choices we're sure you'll agree.

The effects menu allows you to have some fun with your friends with options such as "big nose", "gobbler" and "professor" - oh yes there's hours of fun here for the kids, although you're unlikely to use most of these.

If you're looking for some more sensible settings then you can also adjust white balance, ISO levels, exposure, saturation and contrast - although these are hidden away in a menu within a menu.

There's also a digital zoom incorporated into the camera which can be controlled by the on screen slider and while the further you zoom in decreases the quality of your final image the Ascend P2 does a far better job than most.

Auto-focus is present and settles pretty quickly, allowing you to get into snapping pictures and the responsive shutter button takes just a second to capture an image and turf you back to shooting mode.

The quality of pictures produced by the Huawei Ascend P2 are, on the whole, very good, with a decent level of detail and solid colour reproduction resulting in some very pleasing snaps.

It does struggle a little in poorly lit areas and with close up macro shots, but apart from that you can rely on the Ascend P2 to give you some worthy photos to show off to your friends and family.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Click here to see the full resolution image

Video

Thanks to the powerful 13MP camera on the rear of the Huawei Ascend P2, you are able to shoot full HD, 1080p video at 30fps with the handset.

The video recorder is accessed via the camera app, just flick the slide in the bottom right corner to camcorder to get started.

You get the same three tools (flash, camera select and tap-to-focus) to one side of the display, plus the digital zoom is still at your disposal.

While recording you can zoom in and out as much as you like, but you can't toggle the flash so you'll need to decide if you want it on or off before you hit that red button.

In the settings menu you can also select HDR video, which will remove various shadows to give you clearer footage, while the image stabiliser will reduce the amount of camera shake in the video.

The Huawei Ascend P2 is capable of producing some really nice video footage - crisp and clear, you won't be disappointed.

Media

With a 4.7-inch display, quad-core processor, 4G connectivity and 13MP camera the Huawei Ascend P2 has the capabilities of offering up a decent multimedia experience.

The amount of available internal storage is also ok, with 11.83GB of the 16GB stuffed inside the Ascend P2 available to use, but annoyingly there's no microSD slot to expand on this.

Getting content onto the Ascend P2 is pretty straight forward - just connect it up to your computer with the bundled USB cable, allow the drivers to install and then drag and drop your music, video, photo and other files into the relevant folders on the device.

There's a file manager app included on the Ascend P2 which means you'll be able to locate any documents which may go astray in the transfer - although we still wish there was a micoSD slot.

We did find the Ascend P2 was a little bit sluggish when it came to using the music, video and gallery features - especially when we loaded the phone up with lots of content, so you'll need a little bit of patience if you're planning a media marathon.

Music

The Huawei Ascend P2 comes equipped with two music player options in the form of the Google Music and Music apps.

Huawei's own Music app offers up a basic player with the option to filter you music by title, artist, album or favourites, while the playlist feature allows you to group tracks together to create the ultimate party mix.

On the player screen itself you get the standard controls such as play/pause, skip, shuffle, repeat - plus there's a quick link to toggle the Dolby Digital sound enhancement - a similar feature to the Beats Audio technology you find on HTC handsets.

If you have lyrics attached to your song files then the Ascend P2 can display these instead of the album art on the player screen, while lockscreen controls allow you to manage your playback without having to unlock the handset every time.

Google Music is more of a fully featured offering and we'd recommend dragging it out of its Google folder and swapping it over with the Music app, as it offers a far more attractive and intuitive interface.

As well as giving you access to the tracks stored on the Ascend P2, you can also access any songs you may have uploaded to Google's cloud - the search giant lets you store 20,000 tunes there - which means you don't have to worry about filling up the 16GB of internal storage with your favourite beats.

The Google Music app offers all of the features as the stock Music app, but on top of this it also has the "Instant Mixes" function, which will automatically create an endless playlist of songs based on your favourite tracks and artists - which is pretty smart.

There's also a link to the music store which is part of Google Play, which allows you to increase your music library by purchasing and downloading more tunes right on the handset.

Sound quality is more than acceptable for casual listeners, although the more discerning audiophiles may not be as impressed, but on the whole you can't really knock the Ascend P2 for its audio playback.

The internal speaker located round the back of the handset is, as you'd expect, pretty tinny and you really want to be using a pair of headphones, or external speakers if you fancy pumping out the beats.

We found the Ascend P2 coped with all the major audio formats including MP3, WMA and ACC, so you shouldn't have any trouble getting your current library of tracks to play on the handset.

FM Radio

The old FM Radio is something which doesn't get much of a look-in on today's smartphones, but Huawei has taken it upon itself to include one on the Ascend P2.

There's a straightforward app to see you through the listening process, and it allows you to have eight preset stations - allowing you to jump to your favourite DJ at the touch of a button.

You'll need to plug a set of headphones into the Ascend P2 to act as the antenna but there is the choice to play the stations via the internal speaker if you don't fancy donning the ear buds.

Video

The Huawei Ascend P2 doesn't come with a dedicated video player app, which leaves you with either the Gallery or Google Play Movies apps to choose from.

We found the Gallery app a highly frustrating way of accessing our movies as it just lumps them in with the camera photos which leads to a lot of needless scrolling to find the content you want.

Click on a video to play and you get the most basic of players, with the Ascend P2 offering up play/pause and scrubbing - and that's pretty much your lot.

There is a toggle for the Dolby Digital sound enhancement and a link to share you clip via a multitude of channels in the top right corner, but there is very little to write home about here - it's a simple tap and play scenario.

Over in the Google Play Movies app videos are a lot easier to find, plus you can jump into the Google Play store and select from a wide range of titles to either rent or purchase - although the player itself is still the same basic offering.

When it came to format support the Ascend P2 was pretty hit a miss - it happily played our 720p MPEG-4, MOV and 1080p MPEG-2 clips, but it point blank refused our 1080p MKV and WMV files - so make sure you check your video works before leaving the house.

The 4.7-inch, 720p display on the Huawei Ascend P2 provided a strong playback offering, with film looking detailed and crisp, although we did find it was a little on the dark side, even with the brightness whacked up.

It's pretty comfortable to hold, and thanks to its light frame we were able to keep hold of the Ascend P2 during the entire length of a film without our wrists starting to ache.

Photos

The Gallery on the Huawei Ascend P2 is the stock Android offering, displaying your images in easy to view thumbnails, although as we've already mentioned videos are also lumped in here for good measure.

This frustration aside the Gallery is simple and functional, and it even includes a basic inbuilt editor which allows you to crop and rotate your snaps as well as apply a few simple effects such as Posterise, Vignette and Fisheye.

Of course you can always download more complete editing suites from Google Play, but the editor will suffice for casual users.

You can also easily share any of your pictures with just a couple of taps, be it over DLNA or sent in an email, MMS or posted on a social networking site.

Battery life and connectivity

Battery life

The Hauwei Ascend P2 comes equipped with a non-removable 2420mAh battery, which may frustrate power users who won't be able to swap out a dead power pack for a fresh, fully charged one.

Huawei quotes that the Ascend P2 should last for 272 hours on 4G standby, and 286 hours for 3G standby, while it should give 767 minutes of 3G talktime.

These figures are always very best case scenarios and you'll probably never be able to match them in the real world, and that's certainly what we found during our time with the Ascend P2.

During the spells where we had our 3G SIM card in the handset we were able to eek out a whole days usage with the P2 without too much trouble, although it always needed a charge at the end of each day.

Swapping over to our 4G SIM and the battery life took a bit more of a battering, as with only relatively moderate usage we found ourselves dashing for the charger when it got to early evening.

If you're a heavy smartphone user then you'll need to make sure you have a back up power pack with you, or are always near a plug socket, as the Ascend P2 will eat through its battery at a rate of knots if you're doing a series of demanding tasks.

There is a power management section in the settings menu to try and help you eek out extra life from your Ascend P2, but this didn't seem to make a huge amount of difference - the best thing to do is turn off mobile data and stick screen brightness on low if you're running out of juice.

It's not the best battery life we've experienced at this end of the market with both the Galaxy S4 and HTC One offering up longer lasting solutions, although if you're careful you can get a whole day of the Ascend P2, which is pretty much standard for smartphones today.

Connectivity

We've already spoken about the superfast 4G capabilities of the Huawei Ascend P2 and that Cat 4 LTE technology is back up by Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and NFC.

There's also a microUSB port on top of the device which is used for charging the Ascend P2 as well as connecting to your computer.

You can even use the P2 as a portable internet hotspot, allowing you to share its superfast 4G connection with other devices such as laptops and tablets - although you'll want to keep an eye on your data usage to make sure you don't go over your limit and rack up a huge bill.

So all in all there's plenty of options to get your Ascend P2 connected to your various other devices, and the P2's 16GB of internal storage puts it at least on par against some of its rivals.

There's no microSD slot, but the inclusion of DLNA support means you're able to wirelessly stream media such as photos and movies to other compatible devices such as game consoles and laptops.

It's easy to share your content too, with quick links to the DLNA system as well as Wi-Fi and co. in the gallery, plus the DLNA app makes sharing media an easy and intuitive experience.

The quick settings in the pull down notification bar means it's easy to toggle key connections without having to dive into the full blown settings menu - although once again this isn't anything new and is available on a number of different Android smartphones.

Maps and apps

Maps

The Huawei Ascend P2 comes pre-installed with the excellent Google Maps thanks to its Android innards and we don't need to go one about the fleet of options it offers including StreetView, live traffic, public transport, directions and free turn-by-turn navigation.

We found the Ascend P2 usually took a couple of seconds to load up the maps app, although after that it could pinpoint our location within a second or so.

Panning and zooming around the maps was generally pretty good, but it wasn't as smooth and slick an experience as on the likes of the top end handsets from Samsung or HTC.

Turning on things such as traffic and satellite view slowed things down a little more, but it wasn't unusable on the Ascend P2 and we were still able to plan routes and check local public transport times without issue.

As we moved around the Huawei Ascend P2 managed to keep hold of our location well and track our progress on the map.

Turn-by-turn navigation was also reliable and the Ascend P2 offers up a more than acceptable sat nav replacement in-car.

The bright, crisp display meant maps rendered well and were easy to read, although the app sometimes got a bit confused when we tried to zoom in, mistaking our gestures for rotating the orientation of the map - not a big issue, but it was a little frustrating.

Apps

One of the good things about the Huawei Ascend P2 is that it hasn't been loaded up with lots of pre-installed apps out of the box - giving you a relatively blank canvas on which to grow your personal collection.

You can do this by heading over to the well-stocked Google Play store which boasts over 700,000 apps and games, as well as movies, TV shows, music, books and magazines.

There's plenty of free and paid-for options to suit pretty much any taste, and the easy drag and drop folder creation system on the homescreens means you can organise all your downloads into a manageable system.

You do get a handful of apps included on the Ascend P2 alongside the range of Google apps which include Hangouts, YouTube, Gmail, Google+ and Voice Search.

Basic apps such as flashlight, calculator and sound recorder are all pretty self-explanatory and although they make look a little childish thanks to the Emotion UI Huawei has slapped on the Ascend P2, they are at least functional and simple to use.

They are all handy features, but none are exactly things to write home about, but the Kingsoft Office application provides a useful viewer for Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

You can even edit the documents on the Ascend P2 and this could be a life saver if you need to make a quick amendment on the way to the meeting, but trying to tackle a complex spreadsheet on a 4.7-inch display is pretty tricky, so you're best off keeping things simple.

Hands on gallery

Verdict

The Huawei Ascend P2 finds itself between a bit of a rock and a hard place. On the one hand it's got an impressive spec sheet and attractive price point, but on the other it's supposed to be going head to head with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One and Nokia Lumia 925 - and it doesn't really match the same dazzling heights of any of these handset.

We liked

The Huawei Ascend P2 is a respectable all-round handset which offers up a decent set of specs wrapped up in a simplistic, if not slightly childish, wrapper know as the Emotion UI.

It may not suit everyone's taste - especially the hardened Android fans - but for those who aren't so technically minded the Ascend P2 may offer up a less baffling experience.

The Ascend P2 was able to run Android Jelly Bean with little issue and we experienced smooth operation during most of our activities on the phone.

With a 13MP camera capable of capturing some decent images and a solid build quality the Ascend P2 doesn't let itself down.

We disliked

As we've mentioned the UI won't suit everyone and it's certainly not the easiest on the eye - even with a large selection of themes to choose from, none really ooze premium, class or sophistication.

Battery life isn't awful, but it also isn't the best we've seen and the 4G connection can really eat into it, especially if you're planning on downloading large files or streaming video.

We didn't enjoy using the Huawei-made keyboard on the Ascend P2 either and the quicker we'd installed a replacement the better a handset it became - we just wish the Chinese firm had stuck with the default Google offering.

There's no a microSD slot available, so you're stuck with the 11.83GB of internal storage made available by Huawei on the Ascend P2 and if you plan on watching movies or playing some graphically intensive games on the handset you may find this filling up fast.

Verdict

The Huawei Ascend P2 is a highly capable smartphone which offers a strong line up of features and a decent level of specs - although it doesn't exactly excel at anything, or wow us with amazing features.

It also has the tricky problem of the Huawei Ascend P6 which basically lines up alongside the Ascend P2 sporting a fancier, slimmer metallic frame, although spec wise it's not quite as cutting edge.

So as well as fighting with its brother the Ascend P2 also has the difficult task of marking itself out as a flagship device in a market dominated by the superior Galaxy S4, HTC One and Xperia Z.

Of course the Huawei Ascend P2 does carry a far more attractive price tag, but that still means it's doing battle with the still excellent Galaxy S3, One X+ and iPhone 4S, and with the Huawei brand not exactly in the mind of the everyday consumer it could be a tricky sell.

That's not to say you'll be disappointed if you do opt for the Ascend P2 and it is a potentially great value 4G option at the top end of the market.

The Core i5-3570K was the best all-round gaming CPU. The i5-4670K is faster than the old 3570K, and only costs slightly more, so surely it's a worthy successor? Well, yes and no.

Intel has been bigging up Haswell as a major new CPU design, and you'd expect that to mean significant improvements - actual tangible benefits - but there aren't really any to be had. There are even areas where the new chips might be worse than their predecessors.

Let's start with the CPU cores themselves. Intel has applied what sounds like a pretty decent set of tweaks and mods, including better branch prediction, bigger data-level structures, more execution ports and some new floating point extensions. But on a clock-for-clock and core-for-core basis, the new cores turn out to be only very marginally better.

Same old, same old

That leaves only clockspeeds and core counts to give them a chance of achieving a tangible performance improvement. But the 4670K has the same 3.4GHz baseclock and 3.8GHz Turbo as the old 3570K, with the same quad-core layout, and 6MB of Intel Smart Cache.

Overclocking is zero sum too. Our 4.5GHz top speed is a little less than we've generally seen from a 3570K. The only difference is that you're pretty much guaranteed to get that from a 3570K.

Our sources in the chip channel tell us that the new Haswell models are much more variable in terms of the speeds you can achieve with retail chips, which means most gaming systems are likely to be sold with a conservative 4.2GHz overclock at best.

We're not overly distracted by the new base clock strap Intel has exposed for the K series models, either. It gives a bit more flexibility, allowing you to hit some intermediate speeds you can't achieve with the CPU multiplier alone.

Benchmarks

CPU rendering performance
Cinebench R11.5: Index score: Higher is better
Core i7 4770K: 8.41
Core i5 4670K: 6.36
Core i5 4570: 6.16
Core i7 3770K: 7.78

Video encoding performance
X264 v4.0: FPS: Higher is better
Core i7 4770K: 45.5
Core i5 4670K: 36.9
Core i5 4570: 37.59
Core i7 3770K: 43.55

Overclocking performance
Max OC: GHz: Higher is better
Core i7 4770K: 4.7
Core i5 4670K: 4.5
Core i5 4570: N/A
Core i7 3770K: 4.8

Surely the 100MHz increments provided by the multiplier are good enough for everything bar bragging rights? Well, no. You just can't feel 50MHz in-game and it's not going to shave significant time off a video encode job.

Intel has made a lot of noise about graphics, but it doesn't really affect the 4670K. Yes, it's a bit better than the old 3570K. You get 20 execution units as opposed to 16, but that's still half the number of the really interesting Iris and Iris Pro graphics cores that Intel is restricting to other Haswell chips. Nor do you get the 128MB of eDRAM that's exclusive to Iris Pro.

In short, there's progress, but it's not enough to ultimately matter.

Verdict

All of which leaves us with Haswell's final innovation - improved battery life - but this is a desktop chip, so that doesn't apply. Better power consumption is always a good thing, but the savings are tiny for grid-connected appliances.

There you have it. The new Intel Core i5-4670K enters the CPU charts as our new favourite all-round gaming CPU. And it's also a huge disappointment. So it goes.

Introduction

We've discovered that the model we were sent for review is pre-production, despite Huawei's affirmations otherwise. In line with our stringent reviews guarantee, we've rolled this back to a preview - stay tuned for our full review when we get a final sample in soon.

The Huawei Ascend P6 represents the Chinese smartphone manufacturer's biggest attempt yet to join the Android elite. It boasts a level of design and a range of quietly innovative features that are in many ways worthy of Samsung, HTC, LG and Sony at their best.

Despite this, it's not quite in the same category as the absolute top-spec beasts such as the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4, and Sony Xperia Z. In fact, with its 4.7-inch 720p display and 8-megapixel camera it's closer in raw specs to the likes of the Google Nexus 4 and the Samsung Galaxy S3.

Infact the Huawei Ascend P2 features slightly better specs such as a 13MP rear camera, although it's body isn't as premium as the P6's.

Of course, with the phone set to be offered for around £25 per month on contract, the Ascend P6 will also be considerably cheaper than the current top crop. You might even call it an upper-mid range device.

But you get the feeling Huawei is taking a slightly different approach here. With some of its sleek hardware, software design cues and focus on style and functionality over willy-waving specs, the Huawei Ascend P6 appears to be following Apple's lead more than any of the aforementioned Android giants.

It's immediately clear the moment you take it out of its classy, compact white box. The super-slim, squared-off body, flat surfaces and metallic rim are pure iPhone 5 (though the colouring of our black model is closer to the iPhone 4S). It even comes with its own pre-packed 'bumper', but don't worry - we didn't notice any death-grip issues.

That's not to say that the Huawei Ascend P6 is a straight-ahead iPhone knock-off - its rounded bottom edge and subtly textured rear see off that charge.

Unlike the major devices listed above, then, the Huawei Ascend P6 doesn't have a distinctive design language to call its own, but that doesn't mean it isn't a pleasure to hold and to look at.

The handset's sleek design isn't just easy on the eye, either. At a shade under 6.2 mm thick, Huawei is claiming that this is the slimmest smartphone in the world. It's certainly a good 1.4 mm thinner than the iPhone 5 and a whopping 3.1 mm slimmer than the HTC One, which is the closest Android phone to this in terms of premium feel.

At 120g, the Huawei Ascend P6 is also a good 10 grams lighter than the Samsung Galaxy S4 or the Google Nexus 4.

All in all,the phone's lightness and slimness, allied to an extremely thin bezel, makes for a rare 4.7-inch smartphone that's viable to use one-handed - provided you have reasonably long flexible fingers, of course.

Going back to that 4.7-inch display, whilst it's 'only' a 720p model - which means it can't compete with 1080p big-hitters like the HTC One for sheer sharpness - it is one of the better examples of its kind.

Colour reproduction is excellent, and you can tweak the colour temperature within the settings menu if you're used to a warmer or cooler display.

There's even a Magic Touch feature that enables you to use the phone with your gloves on, which is a fantastic thing to have when you live in a generally chilly country like the UK.

This should really be in more smartphones by now, but so far it's only really Nokia (although the likes of Samsung and co. are getting on board slowly) that's adopted it with any enthusiasm. Well done Huawei.

In terms of external ports and buttons, Huawei has made some interesting decisions. The power button and volume rocker placement is pretty tradition, up high on the right hand side. In both look and ultra-clicky feel they reminded us of the Asus PadFone 2 equivalents, which is no bad thing.

The most notable thing on the controls front is the lack of physical or capacitive control keys. Rather, Huawei is one of the few third party manufacturers to follow Google's lead and opt for virtual buttons built into the UI (more on which in a moment).

The ports are even more unorthodox. You'll find the microUSB port situated on the top edge of the Ascend P6, which is unusual in itself. But the truly out-there element here is the 3.5mm headphone jack, which is situated right at the bottom of the left hand edge.

That would be odd enough, but then there's the bizarre metal nub-like cover that we initially mistook for a lanyard hook. Once removed, it turns out that it's a small drawing pin-shaped tool for accessing the Ascend P6's SIM and microSD trays.

It looks quite stylish when in place and serves its purpose well when out and in use, but what do you do with this tiny metal object when you're using the headphone socket? Lose it, we suspect.

Still, at least there is a microSD slot present to require such a tool. With a paltry 8GB of internal storage available here, additional memory is sorely needed. For music fans, gamers, and power users 8GB definitely won't be enough, so we're extremely glad that Huawei included a microSD slot - even if accessing it proves a little fiddly.

Interface

The Huawei Ascend P6 runs on Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, which is the latest version of Google's mobile operating system. While Huawei has layered on its own Emotion UI, it still benefits from the optimisations made to the core OS, and swiping between home pages and through apps feels for the most part buttery smooth.

Huawei's Emotion UI is one of the cleaner custom efforts we've seen from Android manufacturers, though it doesn't quite match up to the level of fit and finish found in the Ascend P6's hardware.

It's certainly not without its faults - chiefly in the shape of some poorly executed and thoroughly unnecessary custom apps, which we'll discuss later - but at least the core navigation experience is very slick.

As with the hardware, Huawei appears to have looked to Apple when it comes to software. Not only do the square app folders smack of iOS, but Huawei has taken the unusual step of removing the Android app tray altogether.

Whereas virtually every other custom Android UI copies stock Android in providing a shortcut to a menu of every app stored on the device, Huawei's Emotion UI doesn't. What you see on its multiple home screens (you can have up to nine) is what you get.

This may take some getting used to for long time Android users, but it's really no great hardship. It simply places the onus on creating logically themed app folders, and remembering that you can use the Google Search function to locate specific apps installed on your device.

One thing that feels like a missed opportunity given the lack of an app drawer button is the size of the fixed app bar at the bottom of the home screen.

It would have been nice to have a fifth slot for another frequently used app, but instead Huawei has gone with a chunky four-icons-wide approach.

Another notable feature of Emotion UI is the choice of themes you have. Enter the Themes app and you'll be presented with five possible skins stored locally on your handset. Each them presents a new background skin and complementary stock app icons, as well as unique lockscreen configurations.

You can also customise each element of these skins - so for example you might want the Halo lockscreen for its four unlock shortcuts (the rest have two), but prefer the Apple-esque (pre-iOS 7) brushed aluminum style of the default Taste theme.

There are also a bunch of additional themes that can be downloaded to your phone, expanding the potential for personalisation considerably. It feels a little like downloading a new launcher each time, though in truth the core elements of the UI remain unchanged.

We're not going to say that we prefer this Emotion UI to stock Android - in fact it remains slightly childish-looking and a little unfinished - but at least Huawei is trying something a little different.

Unlike Samsung, for example, it's actually tried to simplify the Android OS and make it more intuitive and attractive to the casual user.

The addition of a dedicated Profiles app, which lets you add customised profiles (who would have guessed?) with tweakable volume, brightness, vibration level and more, is another strong feature of the Emotion UI.

Huawei's own Me widget, which occupies your main homescreen by default is a bit of a mixed bag. It's a mish-mash of basic functions that occupies a good two thirds of the screen.

The weather section is functional but ugly, while the two preferred contact shortcuts are reasonably useful.

The picture book provides a nice automated carousel of your pictures, but it seems strange that it doesn't also provide a shortcut to the Gallery itself.

Most if not all of these functions can be better handled by individual widgets, but at least it's a small matter to delete and replace them through the time-honoured Android method of pressing and holding on a blank area of the homescreen.

As we've made reference to already, the Huawei Ascend P6 adopts Google's preference for virtual navigation buttons over physical equivalents (unlike the Ascend P2 and Huawei Ascend G510), so it's wisely kept the Android functionality related to these keys pretty well untouched.

There are the same back, home and multitasking buttons that generally make themselves available when needed and dip out of view when not needed - though they continue to remain distractingly present during many games.

Multitasking works exactly the same as in stock Android, with a vertical list of snapshots of recently opened apps frozen in the state you left them. They can be jumped into with a touch or dismissed with a swipe.

Notifications are handled in a very similar way to stock Android, with incoming messages, app updates and system requests accessible through a drag-down menu at the top of the homescreen, as well as a number of apps.

Individual items can then be jumped to with a tap or dismissed with a swipe, and some things - like emails - can even be responded to from within the notification bar.

The main change here, other than the switch to a brighter colour palette, is the custom Huawei settings toggles at the top of the notification menu.

You get a choice of nine functions in a horizontally scrolling sub-menu, including Wi-Fi, GPS, and screen brightness. You can customise these from a permanently available 'More' option.

As discussed, the lockscreen changes according to the theme and your own preferences, but the best one contains four drag-to-activate shortcuts for home screen, camera, messaging and phone.

If you're playing a music track through the default Music app or (more likely) Google Music, then you'll also get pause and skip command shortcuts added to the lockscreen too.

One irritation we found with using the Huawei Ascend P6 came through its touch sounds, many of which seemed to follow each little audible click with a second smaller click, as if to mark the ending of the minuscule sample used.

Or perhaps it's some kind of unintentional speaker response. We prefer to have such artificial sounds turned off by default anyway, but those who like a little audible feedback may be driven quietly mad by the additional noises.

Besides the strong Android 4.2.2 foundation and relatively light Emotion UI skin, the Huawei Ascend P6 has the benefit of a 1.5GHz quad-core CPU and 2GB of RAM to keep things ticking long smoothly.

We did notice a little choppiness when multiple things were happening simultaneously (multiple apps downloading or updating in the background for example), but in general usage we found it to be fine.

Our benchmarks revealed that this unit's CPU credentials are roughly in the region (in fact falling a little short) of the Samsung Galaxy S3 and other phones of the 2012 elite class, which tallies with the Ascend P6's other specs and price point.

Contacts and calling

Contacts

As with previous Huawei handsets containing the Emotion UI, the Huawei Ascend P6 derives its Contacts app from the stock Android utility.

This makes for a clean, tidy and intuitive way to locate and interact with your contacts list, and we still have no real complaints about the way Android handles this.

There's a lack of social network account integration by default, but the official Twitter and Facebook apps are only a short hop to the Google Play Store away.

The stock Contacts app contains three main tabs for accessing a list of all your contacts, as well as one for Groups and Favourites - a great way to message multiple contacts and minimise scrolling through hundreds of names to get to the same few people respectively.

Heading into an individual contact listing brings up all of the information on that person that you have tied to your Google account. Tapping the message or phone icon from here will bring up a choice of messaging or calling apps through which you can chat with your contact.

If you have Skype or WhatsApp installed, for example, they will appear here alongside the stock SMS app. This stage can be dismissed by selecting a standard method, if you so wish.

Calling

Huawei has stuck with the stock Android calling app for the Ascend P6, which is another wise decision given its slick tie-in with and thematic similarity to the contacts (or People) app.

It's another case of crisp, minimalistic Google design, and it doesn't feel completely out of place here given the stripped-back nature of the Emotion UI.

More importantly, it's incredibly functional. A chunky dialpad takes up the bottom two thirds of the screen, along with shortcuts to the contacts app, options, and a bright green call button.

You can also make use of smart dialling - just type in the bits of a number you can remember and the top third of the screen will instantly narrow down the numbers that contain this sequence.

Otherwise, the top part of the screen contains your most recent calls, ready to be called again with a tap.

Calls on the Huawei Ascend P6 were impressively loud and clear during our tests, and we didn't experience any drop outs or issues with holding the device in a certain way - which is reassuring given the design's similarity to the iPhone 4.

Messaging

The Huawei Ascend P6 is as complete a messaging device as any other modern Android phone - which is a round-about way of saying that emailing and texting is pretty much identical.

But that's okay. Android is possibly the best smartphone platform around for messaging. Why mess with what works best?

The actual messaging app on the Huawei Ascend P6 is, once again, derived from the stock Android Jelly Bean example. You get a sparse, clear conversation view with speech bubbles that alternate between the left and right hand side of the screen, as well as between white and green, depending on who is talking.

It's incredibly easy to follow conversation threads in this way, which is why it's a method that pretty much everyone has adopted, including Apple's iOS and Microsoft's Windows Phone.

You can also zoom into and out here to make the text bigger or smaller, and there's a permanent phone icon at the top of the screen to jump you into a phone call with the current message recipient.

As has become normal with Android phones these days, the Huawei Ascend P6 comes with a choice of keyboards - the stock Android Jelly Bean example and a custom one from the manufacturer.

The Jelly Bean example is preferable thanks to its voice-input and smart prediction capabilities, the latter of which offers you a constantly updating choice of possible words based on your inputs.

This isn't the latest version of the Android keyboard, however, and it's worthwhile downloading Google Keyboard from the Google Play Store. This is very similar, but it adds a swipe-based (and Swype-like) handwriting system that many users have grown to prefer.

The Huawei Input Method may not be as strong, but it has a couple of unique ideas that we rather like. Its method of selecting the alternative inputs by swiping down is excellent, and far smoother than the standard long-press method.

We also appreciated the ability to switch to a T9 keyboard by swiping to the left or the right, which makes one-handed text input a real possibility.

Email is handled by the standard Gmail app, which has recently been improved considerably. As mentioned earlier, you can now reply to or archive emails directly from the notification menu.

There's also now a slide-out folder navigation menu and a new system that tags each email with the profile pictures of all the contacts involved.

In addition, there's a standard email app that enables you to pull in any other email POP3 or IMAP accounts you might have. You can flick between multiple email accounts easily enough, but we were strangely unable to set up our Yahoo account whilst our Apple 'Me' account worked just fine.

Internet

Huawei joins the likes of Asus in including both the stock Android web browser and Google Chrome with the Ascend P6. It's a baffling decision any way you look at it, though not a unique one.

There's absolutely no call for two web browsers on mobile, especially when one is the natural replacement for the other from the exact same developer (Google).

In fact, we'd say that the old-style Android browser has been made the default, purely because it stands on its own on the home screen, whilst Chrome is tucked away within a Google apps folder.

That's not to say that the Android browser is bad. It's still a very slick way to browse the internet, with tabbed browsing and the ability to save pages for later offline viewing.

It's just that Chrome is better. It's quicker, better looking, and it ties in with the desktop version of the browser - which is one of the world's most popular, lest we forget - to enable synced bookmarks and search results.

Chrome no longer supports Flash, but that's no longer the pain in the neck that it used to be. The web is rapidly transitioning to HTML5. Still, if you really must have a Flash-compatible web browsing experience on your Huawei Ascend P6, there's always Firefox on the Google Play Store.

The beauty of Android is that you can swap to any other browser - be it Opera, Firefox, Dolphin, or any of the others - and make it your default option.

But with Chrome on board, we can't see that this will be necessary for many people. Just find a nice quiet folder to tuck the Android browser into (it can't be deleted) and pull Chrome out of its corner.

Camera

There are signs of notable innovation in the Huawei Ascend P6's camera set-up. The first caused a bit of a double take when we first saw the spec sheet - it has a 5-megapixel FRONT-facing camera.

That's a lot of pixels for something that's essentially used for video calls and the odd casual self-shot. Even high-end Android phones tend to have only 2-megapixel front-facing cameras at best.

With the addition of Huawei's facial enhancement software, and the default two-second countdown timer when you switch to the front camera, Huawei is clearly angling for for improved self-portrait photos.

Beauty mode gives you an instant airbrush effect that smooths out those wrinkles and pock marks. This can be adjusted on a scale of one to ten, with the top setting making you look a little odd and rubbery, like a soap star in a cheap gossip mag.

The front-facing 'selfie' shots do pack in a little more detail than rival efforts, but not to the point where you'll be taking any serious images with it. The real mark of a strong smartphone camera tends not to be the megapixel count. As we've discovered, the image sensor and lens array is far more important.

Which brings us to the main rear-facing camera. It's an 8MP effort, which is in keeping with the Huawei Ascend P6's upper-mid-range specs. It follows the pattern for your average smartphone camera in taking decent pictures in optimal lighting and slightly noisy, washed-out images in anything less.

But where it truly impresses is in its 4cm macro capabilities, which allow you to get in extremely close for those arty Instagram-worthy shots. Combined with a healthy f/2.0 aperture, you can get some lovely depth of field effects with plenty of detail in the foreground and deliberately defocused background (also known as 'bokeh').

Another noteworthy camera trick Huawei has included with the Ascend P6 is a special shooting mode that, each time you press the shutter button, takes both a standard single shot and an HDR (High Dynamic Range) one simultaneously.

We're big fans of this in principle, because it means you get the benefit of HDR without having to specifically set it up - the hassle of which can leave the feature neglected by most users. HDR can often help out when there's a strong contrast between shade and light within a single picture, but it's also dependent on a steady hand and a reasonably static subject for decent results.

This special mode gives you the chance at getting those balanced HDR images with the constant fall-back of a normal image. Having said that, we were left a little disappointed with the HDR results on the Ascend P6, with only a slightly noticeable improvement in contrast and occasionally unnatural-looking skies.

Elsewhere, the camera UI is a bit of a mixed bag. Previewing images feels plain weird, as you realise that swiping 'back' through your pictures (left to right) will return you to the live view. Instead you need to swipe 'forward' in order to navigate backwards. It will feel a little counter-intuitive to some.

Elsewhere you'll find standard Panoramic and Effect modes, with the latter providing a somewhat scanty eight filters to apply to your live pictures.

Other camera settings are generally quite limited, and things like ISO and white balance are tucked away in a menu-within-a-menu, making them impractical to access in a pinch when you're trying to nail that chance shot. Which is pretty much what mobile photography is all about, after all.

All in all a clean and generally intuitive camera UI, but with one or two quirks and limitations.

Click here to see the full resolution image

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Video

We found the Huawei Ascend P6 to be merely competent when it came to shooting video. It can handle Full HD 1080p footage, though in our experience it wasn't completely smooth, with the odd noticeable glitch or stutter.

Video is set to 720p by default - perhaps due to the Ascend P6's limited internal storage, or perhaps because 720p video is that much easier and quicker to share.

Reasonably impressive was the way the phone handled changes in light when moving from the glare of a sunny summer afternoon to the shade of a tree and out again. The auto-correction on these occasions was quick and effective, which is all you can ask of an upper mid-range smartphone camera.

One notable feature that's missing here, and which can be found in most of the Huawei Ascend P6's high-end (and near-high-end) rivals, is the ability to take stills whilst recording video. Instead you simply have the option to switch between the two with a virtual toggle.

On the other hand, image stabilisation, HDR video and object tracking are all options within the stripped-back video interface, though as with the phone's Full HD capability they're all turned off by default.

Image stabilisation didn't seem to be particularly effective when, for example, taking a video whilst walking along.

Media

The Android platform has grown into one of the best media portals around, and the Huawei Ascend P6 generally capitalises on this well with its strong hardware - though the lack of internal storage is an issue.

Add a hefty microSD card, though, and you'll have a fine music and video-playing device in your pocket.

Although the Ascend P6 has access to the full suite of Google media apps, its own attempts at media apps are somewhat below par. Still, if Android is about one thing it's flexibility, and you can really shape your media needs as you see fit here.

Music

Nowhere is the mixed nature of the Huawei Ascend P6's software offering better illustrated than with music.

Starting with the positive - which is the dominant feeling here - Huawei has included Google Music in amongst the suite of Google apps. It's a sublime music player in every way.

Google Music acts as stylish music playing app (complete with lock screen and notification bar control shortcuts), MP3 store (through Google's well-stocked and cheap online service) and cloud music player all in one.

The latter point is particularly noteworthy, because it allows you to either stream your MP3 purchases direct to your ears or upload your personal music collection to the cloud for free (up to 20,000 tracks), and then stream it back over a Wi-Fi or network connection.

Google Music is a winner, then. Which makes us wonder why Huawei then bothered to include its own markedly inferior Music app.

It's functional, with its own notification and lockscreen shortcut controls, but it's ugly when compared to the slick official Google equivalent.

Even worse, it refuses to play nicely with Google Music. Tracks downloaded through Google Music don't seem to appear on Huawei's music app by default, requiring instead that you hook your phone up to your computer and drag and drop files the old fashioned way.

But Huawei redeems this misstep with a fine Dolby Digital Plus sound enhancement system that genuinely boosts and enhances the listening experience without unbalancing the sound profile (hello Beats Audio).

There's real depth and clarity of the sound output here, it seems - and yes, it also works with Google Music.

Video

The Huawei Ascend P6 handled a range of 720p and 1080p MP4 and H.264 video files admirably, but its main strength on the video front is it 4.7-inch 720p display.

It's not the biggest or the sharpest smartphone screen we've encountered in 2013, but it's bright and crisp, rendering HD video very cleanly indeed.

Streaming HD video over YouTube is also faultless, although we did notice a persistent glitch on the right hand side of the screen when streaming HD video through the Netflix app.

As with a number of the minor technical issues we encountered with apps and media content we're hoping these are just compatibility issues with Huawei's custom CPU, and that they can be sorted with a software fix once the handset is out there and selling.

Photos

Viewing photos on the Huawei Ascend P6 is a generally pleasant experience, again thanks to that bright 4.7-inch 720p display and the phone's capable camera.

The Gallery app itself is a fairly bare bones effort, though. Through it you access photos, videos, and even any movies you might have installed on the phone.

The photos and videos are all squeezed together into the same folder, and we would have preferred a little more separation here.

Still, the general thumbnail preview page is intuitive and quick-loading - it's pretty easy to jump to the image you want to see.

There are also four fairly self explanatory tabs for adding some kind of order to your images - Albums, Time, Location and People.

Entering the People tab will run some facial recognition software, allowing your to tag individual faces - though in our experience it didn't pick up on all of the faces in our collection, such as those that were snapped at a bit of an angle.

You can do a spot of light picture editing from the Gallery too - just enter an image and go into the menu to access an Edit option that lets you crop, straighten, rotate, filter, and add effects or borders to your images.

There are more powerful and fully featured editing apps on the Play Store, but it's a welcome inclusion nonetheless.

Sharing is an absolute doddle - just hit the share button, followed by the app or service you want to use, and then select the corresponding thumbnails you want to share.

There's a DLNA app pre-installed for hooking up to your TV, console or any other compatible device, which applies to pushing the videos out too.

Battery life and connectivity

Battery life

The Huawei Ascend P6's 2000mAh battery is about right for a modern quad-core smartphone with a bright 720p HD display, sitting somewhere between the similar Samsung Galaxy S3 and the HTC One X.

That this average battery size didn't impact on the device's below-average size and weight is a tribute to Huawei's engineers.

We managed to wring a full day's usage out of the phone when used normally (a bit of web browsing, light gaming, a few calls and lots of emails and messages) with a reasonable amount left in the tank. Huawei claims to have implemented a couple of energy-saving technologies into the Ascend P6 to facilitate this.

For one thing, it utilises Huawei's Quick Power Control (QPC) and Automated Discontinuous Reception (ADRX) tech to optimise power usage. Huawei also claims that packing all the antennae equipment into the plastic section on the bottom of the device preserves battery life.

In our standard battery test, which involves running a 90 minute 720p video with the screen set to full brightness and all push notifications on, we were left with an average of 78 percent battery life left in the tank.

That's pretty strong. For example, it's exactly the same as the similarly specced Asus PadFone 2 (the 'Fone' part, obviously), despite that device having a larger battery to call upon. Impressive.

Connectivity

There are no surprises on the connectivity front - the Huawei Ascend P6 is every inch the modern upper-mid-range Android phone. This means that all of the main connection options are present and accounted for, but you'll miss out on NFC and 4G.

Given the lack of widespread support for both standards here in the UK, we'd argue that neither is a massive loss - especially if, as is likely, their absence is a contributing factor to the Ascend P6's super-slim body and adequate battery life.

Although if mobile payments finally take off nationwide over the course of your two year contract, you might come to curse Huawei's decision to omit NFC.

Otherwise you get Wi-Fi, GPS, HSPA+ (21 Mbit/s download, 5.76 Mbit/s upload) and Bluetooth connectivity.

There's also a prominent portable Wi-Fi hotspot utility featured on one of the homescreens, enabling you to connect your laptop or tablet up to the internet using the Ascend P6's network connection.

As mentioned already, you also get DLNA connectivity for wireless media streaming to your smart TV, console, or set-top box, and you can charge and hook up to your computer via a microUSB slot on top of the phone.

Hooking up to your computer presents a familiar drag-and-drop interface whether you opt for Media Device or USB storage. What's more, the File Manager app that Huawei provides an easy way to access any files you bring across without having to go searching for the appropriate app to access them with.

Maps and apps

Maps

Mercifully, Huawei hasn't tried to offer an alternative mapping solution to the imperious Google Maps. When even Apple with its resources struggles to top it, you do well to call it quits - especially when Google Maps is an Android OS staple anyway.

It's perhaps telling that the Google Maps app is the only pure Google app to be given its own homescreen allotment outside of the Huawei Ascend P6's default Google apps folder.

It runs predictably well on Huawei's latest smartphone. You have impressively accurate worldwide maps at your disposal, with many of the major cities featuring integrated public transport information and thousands of featured points of interest (restaurants, shops, attractions etc) listed and rated.

Then there's the famed StreetView, which provides interactive photos of virtually every major road and side street in the civilised world. Or at least it feels that way.

You can save limited portions of the map to the Ascend P6's storage, though this still feels like a bit of a half-measure next to something like Nokia's HERE Maps on Windows Phone, which allows for the pre-installation of full countries.

As it is, you'll still realistically need a 3G connection to get the full Google Maps experience while visiting, for example, a foreign city.

Apps

We've made mention of the fact that the Huawei Ascend P6 comes with a full host of Google apps pre-installed. Besides Google Maps, Gmail and Google Music you get such heavy hitters as Google+, YouTube, and the new Hangouts IM and video calling app (via an update), among others.

These Google maps alone can power you through most of your mobile usage, and that's not even including the likes of Google Drive and Google Keep, which can be downloaded from the Google Play Store for free (granting you free cloud storage and cloud note-taking respectively).

Ah yes, Google Play Store. We continue to be amazed at the strides this has taken in recent years; from shoddy, sparsely populated joke to vibrant App Store beater.

In terms of speed, features and design it's far nicer to use than Apple's trend-setting equivalent. The range of apps and games isn't quite there yet, but it's not far off. Almost all of the major apps are present and accounted for on Google Play, including the likes of Dropbox, Instagram, Vine, and Netflix.

Despite a generally slick experience, there are app-related issues specific to the Huawei Ascend P6. For example, when we updated the Google+ app to the latest version, it didn't work, forcing us to roll back to the default option.

Another clash came when downloading Google's own Calendar app to sit alongside the stock example (also called Calendar), which appeared to confuse the phone. It attributed the same icon as the stock example to it, which was a little weird.

There are also issues with gaming apps. For one thing, complex 3D titles such as Real Racing 3, Reckless Racing 2 and Rise of Blobs seem to struggle for performance on the Huawei Ascend P6.

Whether this is a compatibility issue that will be corrected with a simple driver update or individual developer tweaks, or a more serious case of Huawei's GPU solution not being up to the task, we don't know.

We'll have to wait and see on this front, but hardcore mobile gamers might want to hold off until matters become clearer.

Sticking with games, many don't seem to take into account those virtual controls. When playing HD video they'll dip into the background, but that's not always the case with games, shortening the game field a little and generally getting in the way.

The other minor irritation with the Huawei Ascend P6's app offering has already been touched upon in the Interface section - Huawei's rudimentary stock apps.

One more irritant we should highlight here is the Permission Manager that acts like an over-eager shopping centre security guard, constantly checking every time a new app tries to do what it was designed for.

We're all for mobile security, but Huawei's solution seems slightly too over-zealous in its policing. Perhaps it's just the way Huawei presents these checks, but it could do with toning them down a little.

You also get access to Bitcasa, which offers 20GB of free cloud storage for your files. It's no Dropbox, but it's a welcome addition nonetheless.

Hands on gallery

Official gallery

Verdict

Huawei is really hitting its hardware stride, and with the Huawei Ascend P6 it's shown that it can put together a premium-feeling smartphone every inch as special as the major Android players it's out to emulate.

Speaking of inches, the Ascend P6's teeny-tiny waistline is truly a thing to behold - and indeed hold - and actually serves to make it feel like a much smaller phone than its 4.7-inch display would suggest.

Where the phone falls down - and where Huawei really needs to improve if it's to push on and join Samsung, HTC et al in the Android elite - is with the fit and finish of its software. Emotion UI and its attendant apps still feel like a work in progress, though one that's not without promise.

The Chinese firm has also shot itself in the foot somewhat, as the Ascend P2 is very similar in terms of specs, with a slightly better camera and more internal storage, but minus the slender, premium design and microSD slot of the Ascend P6 - this will surely only confuse consumers.

We liked

The Huawei Ascend P6 is a beautifully designed and constructed handset that feels really good in the hand. If you still think of Huawei as churning out cheap and cheerful entry level handsets, this should set you right.

It's also got a truly excellent 4.7-inch LCD display. Yes, it's 'only' 720p, but it's still a crisp and sharp example that makes any media content look great.

And besides, at around £10 a month cheaper than high-end 1080p phones like the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One, it's going to come into consideration for a lot more people.

Emotion UI does a lot of interesting things, such as dropping the App menu and offering multiple themes.

The 8MP camera is capable of some crisp images given enough light, but the star of the show is the phone's Macro capabilities. This is a potential Instagram star.

We disliked

Emotion UI doesn't quite feel there yet with its somewhat crude icons and clunky stock apps. If Huawei could design software as sharp as its hardware, we'd have an unqualified winner.

Having said that, one or two performance issues with demanding apps and some underwhelming benchmark results suggest internals that aren't quite up to the standard of other quad-core devices.

The 3.5mm headphone jack cover / SIM tray key is a novel touch, but it's just begging to be lost.

While the 5MP front-camera is a point of distinction and a source of decent 'selfies,' we can't help thinking it's a slight gimmick, and that we'd have preferred an even better main camera instead.

The lack of NFC and 4G also sets the Ascned P6 back from the forefront of the mobile market, as missing two of the latest mobile technological breakthroughs won't endear it to the tech-enthused masses.

Verdict

The Huawei Ascend P6 shows that the Chinese manufacturer can really make an impression on the Android market with its stunningly slim - if slightly derivative - design, as well as some quirky features that mark it out as a little bit different.

However, Huawei needs to bring its software design up to the same high standard if it's to truly compete at the very top of the game.

Ultimately, you'll struggle to find an upper-mid-range Android phone anywhere near as well built or as stylish as this, but for a little bit more money you can treat yourself to a truly high-end device.

The Ascend P6 may be Huawei's flagship device, but it's not a smartphone which will find itself at the top of smartphone tree - more playing catch-up to an ever strengthening pack.

Toshiba is the latest to announce a tablet that comes with a stylus, furthering the notion that when it comes to slates in 2013 (and the occasional smartphone), 10 sweaty human digits just aren't cutting it for many users.

The 10.1-inch Excite Write lies at the top end of Toshiba's new Excite range of tablets, not that you'd be aware by looking at it. The rear of the tablet features the same dot textured pattern as the basic Excite Pure model, with a harmon/kardon logo in the bottom-right corner alone giving the game away. It's not much of a looker, and those seeking a visually exciting slate should look elsewhere.

At 10.5mm, it's also thicker than other tabs, including Apple's iPad 4 (9.4mm), and Sony's Xperia Tablet Z (7mm), which has the added bonus of being waterproof.

It's just as well that the tablet's screen produces the goods. Boasting a 2560x1600-pixel-resolution display, it beats Apple's iPad 4 in terms of pixel count, and is on par with Google's Nexus 10. Colours look vibrant and the panel produces decent images from a variety of viewing angles.

Additionally, the screen is constructed from Corning's Gorilla Glass 2, which should stave off any unwanted scratches when you're stabbing at it with the supplied stylus.

The Excite Write's high-resolution display can also be found on the Excite Pure and the Excite Pro, so it can hardly be called the tablet's defining feature. That accolade belongs to its ability to take notes using Toshiba's own TruNotes app, which users can store, upload or send to others.

As with most tablets that feature handwriting functionality, the Excite Write's competency to accurately turn scribbles into text partly depends on the neatness of the user's writing. Naturally, ours is up there with the prettiest, so the feature worked well enough in our tests. However, the tablet's weighty feel did little to convince us that holding it in one hand for long periods while writing would be something that we would want to do.

Internally, the Excite Write is powered by a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 4 mobile processor, and packs 2GB RAM. Toshiba is claiming 9.5 hours' use from its battery, which we'll just have to go along with for now. We tested racing game RipTide GP on our demo unit, which zipped along without so much as breaking into a sweat.

In terms of software, Toshiba has loaded the tablet with the Android 4.2 operating system, which comes as close to stock Android as you could hope for on a non-Nexus tablet. Swiping through menus was easy and the tablet allowed us to navigate the OS without any hint of slowdown.

Connectivity-wise, the Excite conceals a row of ports behind a thin strip of plastic that we managed to prise open without too much difficulty. Opening it reveals a microSD card slot, HDMI and micro-USB charging port, which are positioned next to a headphone port. The device also features harman/kardon stereo speakers and offers up 16GB or 32GB of internal storage.

Would we recommend Toshiba's Excite Write upon first impressions? At price of £449.99, it's a solid no, particularly when the Excite Pure, which features the same specs and features without the handwriting functionality, starts at £249.99. You'll be able to check out the device yourself in Q3 when it goes on sale at PC world.

Introduction

The Sony KD-65X9005A is more than just another svelte Internet-enabled TV. Along with the lookalike 55-inch KD-55X9005A, this 65-inch flatscreen is the first 4K Ultra HD format TV that genuinely has an eye on your living space.

Sony's opening 4K gambit, the 84-inch KD-84X9005 may have been first out of the gate, but priced at £25,000 it was never anything other than a rich man's plaything. This new model, priced at £6,000, is a far more realistic (!) proposition.

Make no mistake, the KD-65X9005A is a breed apart from the massed ranks of Full HD widescreens which clamber for space in high street electrical stores and supermarkets. With a resolution of 3840 x 2160, it's able to deliver images four times as detailed as routine 1080p models. This is comparable (give or take some pixels) to the kind of image density you'll see at a cutting-edge movie theatre.

There's more to this set than just Ultra High Definition of course. It's also equipped with a best in class sound system and all the usual Smart TV functionality.

Not that this big screen needs technology to turn heads. As a piece of minimalistic design it's downright stunning. As part of its 4K proposition, Sony has brought TV audio back into the limelight. The set features forward facing stereo speakers which sandwich the display, sculpted into a single sheet of edge-to-edge glass. The result is a sleek, shiny black shard which measures 168.2cm across. The panel itself sits atop a circular chromed stand. For a 65-inch screen, it wears its size extremely well and doesn't feel at all imposing. The screen is just 40.5cm deep

Back panel connectivity comprises four HDMI inputs, three USBs, SCART, component/composite video, Ethernet, a digital optical audio output and CI slot. Wi-Fi is built in. However unlike some Full HD rivals, the set offers only a single tuner (you can choose from Freeview HD or generic satellite). Still you do get two remote controls. A simplified one-touch zapper and a routine IR doofer. Given the premium build of this TV the latter seems particularly lightweight and inappropriate.

The panel itself features Dynamic Edge-LED backlighting, which offers remarkable consistency given the size of the display.

Features

Specification-wise, the KD-65X9005A apes the rest of Sony's 2013 Smart TV line-up. A revised horizontal user interface offers thumbnails for key IPTV services along with an app shortcut to the whole shebang. These appear within a grid, which quickly descends into something of a jumble.

Services include BBC iPlayer, Demand 5, LoveFilm, Netflix, Qello, YuppTV, Crackle, YouTube, Blinkkx, DailyMotion, The Sony Entertainment TV channel, plus plenty of others that you'll never feel the need to look at. The TV also supports Skype, although you'll need to invest in a separate webcam, it's not built-into the frame (just as well, it would ruin those clean designer lines).

The TV offers decent multimedia support, both from its local USB media reader and across a network. All key codecs and containers are catered for, including MKV, AVI, WMV, MPG, MOV, MKV, MP3 and WMA.

Naturally the set is 3D compatible too. It uses Passive technology and comes with four pairs of lightweight polarising glasses. However, this isn't the same Passive 3D we've seen elsewhere in the LCD market. Utilising the inherent resolution of the 4K display, this set's passive images are delivered with full 1080 line clarity. The result is a 3D viewing experience unlike anything outside a commercial theatre.

Picture and sound quality

3D picture quality

The evolution from 1920 x 1080 to 3840 x 2160 resolution has beneficial impacts across the board on the KD-65X9005A, and not just in the most obvious ways. 3D is a dramatic case in point.

Until now, the 3D viewing experience at home has always been a compromise. Passive screens employ cheap glasses which are comfortable to wear, but the image resolution is sacrificed resulting in obvious jaggies. Active Shutter HD delivers a Full HD 3D image, but the glasses are expensive and suffer from strobing effects.

Here, the extra resolution offered by 4K means that Passive 3D is rendered at 1080p. You get to wear the same lightweight specs, but there's no sense of image degradation. Stereoscopic pictures are bright and immersive, and that huge screen really pulls you in. In fact, the KD-65X9005A delivers the best 3D we've ever seen on a consumer telly.

2D Picture quality

Clearly to see this screen at its very best, you need native 4K video content. And there's not an awful lot of that about (well, at the time of writing there's none actually). So to help appraise the screen we borrowed a media server packed with 4K files, specifically a collection of travelogue and artsy stuff, plus 4K trailers for Total Recall and After Earth.

The result is jaw-on-the-floor stuff. Having a super-large 4K display invites you to sit closer, rather than further away, and when you do the incredible amount of detail that can be found in its images is mesmerising. Full HD looks like a rusty Kinetoscope in comparison (a slight exaggeration perhaps, but you get our drift).

But is there any point buying a 4K screen when there's no native content to view? Well, yes, surprisingly there is. What the KD-65X9005A does with both broadcast HD and more significantly Blu-ray is quite extraordinary.

All content sources are mapped to the denser display. This 65-incher and its smaller sibling employ a two-chip 4K X-Reality PRO image engine which comprises an unfeasibly large image algorithm database to upscale content, and impart smooth, nuanced texture to images.

Blu-ray content looks absolutely stunning. There's a level of depth to the picture which is just engulfing. Of course, Sony's silicon can't work miracles, and with SD sources and some broadcast content, there're rough edges to be seen, but for the most part the process is remarkably successful.

It's not just image detail which astounds. The colour performance of this TV is outstanding. A Triluminos display, the panel uses Color IQ semiconductor-based filtering to give a wider colour gamut. With content that's X.V.Color enabled, you get exceptionally deep reds and more vibrant greens.

Sony's upcoming Mastered in 4K Blu-ray titles have all been created with this extended colour space and the results are amazing. However, the TV doesn't need an X.V.Color source to deliver amped up vibrancy, it does so with all content.

The panel is also extremely dynamic, with deep black and bright peak whites. As we've come to expect from the brand, motion handling is a particular strength. The set employs the faster 800Hz iteration of Motionflow processing, retaining maximum detail with fast moving content. For a more filmic look, you can either turn Motionflow off, or select the True Cinema preset.

Sound Quality

Very much bucking the trend for thin, ineffective TV audio, the sound system on this set is full-blooded and borders on hi-fi standard. The magnetic fluid drivers are fast and musical, while a ported bass creates a solid mid-range. Stereo imaging is pronounced and there's no shortage of volume.

Usability and value

There's much to like about Sony's 2013 user interface. It's crisp and easy to navigate. We can even forgive the brand's attempt to push unwanted promotional content at us through the 'Featured' menu strand, as this can be turned off in the settings.

Browsing the EPG is simplified with an optional Fast Zapping mode. This minimises the TV picture, allowing you to click up or down the channel listing. Merely alighting on a station causes the channel to flip. You can also navigate using the stock Freeview programme guide.

Smartphone integration is good. NFC (Near Field Communication) simplifies throwing content from a mobile device onto the screen, although you don't need to use this to achieve screen mirroring from regular smartphones.

One less obvious point about the set is that it's completely silent in operation. Despite its size, there's no intrusive fan noise, the panel runs coolly and efficiently. Similar-sized plasma panels can't claim the same.

On the debit side, the screen itself is extremely reflective. Owners will need to think carefully about where they want to place it, because mounting it facing any direct light source could prove ruinous.

Value

As the first in a new generation of 4K displays, conventional observations about value for money don't quite apply. Inevitably, a groundbreaking TV like this will come with a price premium.

However Sony rewards early adopters with a high-end build that's never going to translate down the line as cheaper 4K panels begin to ship. The design and finish on the KD-65X9005A is sensationally good (and not really done justice with online images).

Verdict

The KD-65X9005A is much more than just another large screen telly. The poster boy for a new generation of broadcast technology, it delivers a picture experience quite unlike conventional Full HD screens.

Image quality with native 4K content is simply astonishing, both in terms of absolute fidelity and image depth. But perhaps the biggest surprise is just how beneficial its panel density is with Full HD too.

Upscaling is extremely effective, and with Blu-ray (particularly Mastered in 4K discs), it simply shines. There's been considerable debate as to whether the 4K at this screen size is an appreciable advantage in the average home. Well we can confirm it most definitely is. Debate closed.

We liked

The KD-65X9005A impresses even before it's powered up. The set has a beautiful design that accentuates its upfront sound system.

Image quality is similarly sublime. Pictures have a smoothness and clarity which is unrivalled. The good news is that it upscales Full HD sources with equal aplomb.

The set's Passive 3D picture performance is also a revelation, both with broadcast 3D and from Blu-ray. The set even has a kick-ass sound system, so there's no need to worry about adding a soundbar just to keep things coherent.

We disliked

The cheapo remote rather undermines the KD-65X9005A's imperial nature. It's a shame Sony couldn't come up with something a little more substantial than this plastic wand to keep things under control.

Timing hasn't really helped this 65-incher, as the new HDMI interface isn't yet ready for primetime, which has implications if and when the Blu-ray standard gets an overhaul to accommodate 4K content.

As it stands, the set is limited to 4K at 30Hz; HDMI v2 is expected to support 4K up to 60Hz. Will this prove significant in the long term? It's difficult to say, although we think it's unlikely that high framerate 4K is going to become the norm anytime soon.

Final verdict

The KD-65X9005A is flat-out the most exciting big-screen TV released this year. With stunning design and advanced picture processing, this 4K debutant impresses with photographic-like image quality, the best consumer 3D we've ever experienced and a top class sound system.

As the harbinger of a new era of broadcasting, it's also surprisingly relevant to today's TV world.

Also consider

Rival 4K screens are thin on the ground at present, although we know that LG, Samsung and Toshiba have all vowed to launch rival products by the end of the year.

The KD-65X9005A's most immediate rival though has to be Panasonic's reference grade TX-60PZT65. This NeoPlasma is the last word in Full HD image quality, and native 4K content aside, gives this big Sony a great run for considerably less money.

Collecting data about everything we do has become an obsession for iPhone owners. This golf swing analyser is a great example of when it works well.

The GolfSense 3D Golf Swing Analyzer is a plastic pebble that straps to your golf glove and collects speed and direction information about your swing, which it then sends to your iOS device. It weighs just 17g, so having it on your glove really won't slow you down at all (though we did find it a pain to fit securely).

• Whatever your sport, here's how to keep fit with your iOS device.

The sensor connects to your iPhone through Bluetooth, sending the data it collects over to it immediately, which you can then browse on the accompanying app (the app beeps when it captures a swing successfully). The information it grabs is enough to produce nicely comprehensive results.

Initially, it uses the speed and direction data to show you a 3D representation of your swing, which you can rotate and zoom in on, and is particularly useful for comparing how well you matched your backswing and downswing (and is also good for seeing how skimming the ground of other mis-hits skewed your arc).

Tap the "Analysis" section at the top and you get a series of screens, each giving information about different areas of your swing, from club head speed to hand speed, wrist rotation and hip rotation (the latter of which is detected using your iPhone itself, if it's in your pocket), and from backswing posture to predicted distance (which didn't seem too accurate to us). Some of these just give you the information, while others will actually tell you if you're doing well or not.

For the most part, you don't need to interact much with the app when playing - before your swing, just hold your club still with the head next to the ball for one second and the app will prime itself - but you do need to manually identify which club you're going to use before each swing. When you interact with it (at the end of the round or after every swing) is up to you; either's fine as far as the app goes, and if you'd rather review everything on the larger iPad screen, all your data syncs to it over the cloud.

While out on the course, we found ourselves only reaching for it after a particularly good shot, checking whether it was a fluke or whether we'd nailed the technique. As with most of these types of things, the issue with using the GolfSense system properly is that there's only so much you can do with it on its own - you really need to combine it with some coaching.

We're not criticising the Swing Analyzer for that, mind, but it's important to remember that an analysis of what you're doing with your club is only half the story - you need someone to tell you what to do with your body, too.

Verdict

The biggest disadvantage of the GolfSense sensor is that it really eats your battery life - you'll need a battery pack for your iPhone when doing a round of 18.

It isn't cheap, but it produces a wealth of useful information from a tiny package. Not a perfect hole in one, then, but if you're serious about improving your swing, it definitely makes the cut.

Introduction

Nokia has done what we asked: released a Windows Phone handset in metal. Except it's not all metal. And it's very similar to the Nokia Lumia 920. And it's in the high-end price bracket... but does a stunning camera warrant the extra cost?

Last year's Lumia 920 was a decent handset. It married striking looks to a quality screen and an even better camera. However, while it was undeniably good there was still some room for improvement, as being a flagship phone many hoped for better specs, less weight and a more premium build.

Now the Finnish phone-smiths are back with the Nokia Lumia 925. It's only seen a small number boost in its name, and if you assumed that meant that not much had changed, well, you'd be right.

While Nokia has equipped the Lumia 925 with a similarly brilliant camera and gone some way to addressing the build of its flagship, it hasn't really improved the specs, leaving the Nokia Lumia 925 in the curious position of feeling more like a tweaked handset than an all new one.

This could be a problem, since it's priced at a wallet-bothering £500 (around US$785/AU$820) SIM free, while the Nokia Lumia 920 can be had for around £150 less.

With a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and just 1GB of RAM the Nokia Lumia 925 matches the Lumia 920 for horsepower and trails some way behind the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S4 or Sony Xperia Z - both of which have double the RAM and quad-core processors.

Arguably Nokia didn't need to go all out, since it doesn't have a huge amount of competition in the Windows Phone space - only the HTC Windows Phone 8X really poses much of a threat. But it seems like a missed opportunity to compete on a level playing field against the wider phone world.

At first sight you might almost not recognise the Lumia 925 as a Nokia handset. It has the same sharply rectangular shape that the Nokia Lumia 920 has, but where that was all brightly coloured plastic, the Nokia Lumia 925 has a shiny aluminium band running around the sides. It gives it a premium edge that is sorely lacking from other Nokia handsets, and it looks good for it.

Unfortunately Nokia hasn't gone the whole hog and made a completely metal handset like the HTC One, and instead made the back from polycarbonate. It still looks decent and the fairly conservative colour options (black, white or silver) mean that it looks a lot classier and more grown up than the Nokia Lumia 920, but it doesn't come close to the premium look or feel of the HTC One.

Despite incorporating metal into its design, the Nokia Lumia 925 is actually lighter than the Nokia Lumia 920, coming in at 139g (4.9oz) compared to the 185g (6.5oz) Lumia 920. The weight was one of our key qualms with the Nokia Lumia 920, so it's good to see that it's been addressed.

At a sleek 8.5mm (0.33 inches), the Nokia Lumia 925 is quite a bit thinner than its 10.7mm (0.42-inch) predecessor too, while the length and width remain almost identical at 129 x 70.6mm (5.08 x 2.78 inches).

It feels nice in the hand and it's generally quite comfortable to hold, though there are a couple of caveats to that. Firstly the position of the camera lens on the back makes it very easy to accidentally put your fingers over it, which is uncomfortable and could leave marks on the lens.

And secondly, the corners aren't very curved, which means they can dig into your hand if you hold the phone in a certain way. On the plus side, the polycarbonate back feels soft and warm against your palm, which is a comforting sensation.

The front of the Nokia Lumia 925 is dominated by the 4.5 inch 768 x 1280 AMOLED screen. It's not quite edge to edge but it's not far off at the sides - although there's reams of plastic above and below, which seems a trifle unnecessary. It's a good size too in our opinion, big enough to use easily without becoming unwieldy.

At 332 pixels per inch it also has a pretty good pixel density, though not one that will bother the HTC One or Samsung Galaxy S4. And in fact it's exactly the same size and resolution as the previous model, which is a little disappointing. However it does use the same impressive PureMotion HD+ ClearBlack technology as the Nokia Lumia 920.

Above the screen there's Nokia's logo, the earpiece and the 1.3 MP front-facing camera, while below the screen there are three soft touch buttons with icons for Start, Back and Search.

Flip the Nokia Lumia 925 over and you'll find another Nokia logo stamped across the middle of the polycarbonate back, while above that there's an 8.7MP Carl Zeiss camera lens and flash, and near the bottom of the handset there's a speaker.

The plastic around the lens is raised, leaving the lens itself slightly indented. That gives it a little protection when putting the phone down, but it also makes the phone less comfortable to hold as your fingers will often stray over the raised area.

The left edge of the phone consists of a strip of metal with no real features on it, while the right edge has the power button in the middle, a volume rocker just above it and the camera button near the bottom. The buttons are all quite raised and responsive, making them easy to press and easy to find by touch alone. They're also spaced out enough that there's no confusion over which is which.

The top of the Nokia Lumia 925 houses the micro SIM card slot at the left, the micro USB port and 3.5mm headphone port near the centre and the microphone to the right.

The bottom edge is left unadorned, with just the metal band running along it.

You can't remove the back cover so there's no getting to the Nokia Lumia 920-matching 2000mAh battery and there's also no microSD card slot, so unlike some lower-end Nokia handsets (such as the Nokia Lumia 520), the storage isn't expandable. This leaves the Nokia Lumia 925 with just 16GB of memory, which is half what the Nokia Lumia 920 offers - although 32GB options are apparently going to be available.

The Nokia Lumia 925 is slimmer and lighter than the Nokia Lumia 920. It also has a more premium build and a slightly improved camera (more on that later) but with the same core specs, less storage space and a much higher price tag it's got an uphill struggle on its hands.

Interface

The Nokia Lumia 925 runs Windows Phone 8, which is the latest version of Microsoft's mobile operating system, but it's also the same version the Nokia Lumia 920 runs, so it's another area where we're getting a sense of déjà-vu.

The first thing you'll see when using the phone is the lock screen. This displays a wallpaper in the background, then overlays that with the time, day and date in large white writing.

Below this you'll see your latest calendar event or reminder or missed calls, texts or emails, depending on how you set it up in the Settings screen.

At the top there's a battery bar, signal strength indicator and additional icons for any active data connections.

Swipe up to clear the lock screen and land on the start screen where you'll find the familiar tile-based layout that makes Windows Phone handsets stand out from the crowd.

Each tile corresponds to an application and you can tap on it to launch the app or long-press it to move, resize or remove the tile.

Many of the tiles aren't just static images, instead displaying relevant pictures or information.

For example your email app might tell you how many unread messages you have, while the People app has a slideshow of contact images.

It's an attractive and stylish design, but beyond that it makes the tiles more useful than the mere shortcuts that most apps on Android or iOS use. Each tile can almost be considered a widget in its own right.

Another way in which Windows Phone 8 is different from competitors is that rather than having a series of distinct home screens that you swipe horizontally between, it has one long start screen that scrolls seamlessly up and down.

Aside from launching apps and rearranging icons there are a few other things that you can do here.

The top-right of the Nokia Lumia 925's screen displays the time in small white writing, but if you want to see anything else - for example the battery level or signal strength - then a quick tap at the top of the screen will momentarily reveal these things.

It keeps the start screen tidy but it's not something that you'd necessarily discover very quickly the first time that you use the phone, so we wish it was a bit more intuitive.

The soft touch buttons below the screen each have at least one use.

The Back button enables you to scroll back through previous screens if you tap it, but if you long-press it you're presented with an overview of all your recently used apps and can just tap one to return to it.

Similarly, the Start button also has two uses. Tapping it will return you to the start screen if you're anywhere else, while holding it for a second will bring up a voice-based personal assistant.

You can ask it to open apps, make calls, send texts or look something up on the web, and it does a good job too - though if you know your way around the phone it's not really any quicker than just doing things by hand.

Finally, the Search button brings up a Bing web search if you'd rather type your search queries than speak them. Unlike the other two buttons this one only has a single use.

Swipe right from the start screen and you'll find a list of all your apps laid out in alphabetical order.

While you can make start screen tiles for everything, you don't have to, and this list will give you access to things whether or not they're on your start screen.

If you do want to add something new to the start screen just long-press it, while tapping it will launch it as you might expect.

There's also a magnifying glass at the top that enables you to type in a search for a specific app, although as it's laid out alphabetically anyway there shouldn't be much need.

You'll find a link to the Settings screen near the bottom of this, and it's a screen that looks rather different to the start screen. Gone are the bright colours and tiles, so instead it's just a black and white list of options.

It's basic but looks nice enough, and more importantly it's easy to navigate and actually get to the options you need, which include everything from changing your ringtone to adjusting how long the screen will stay on for.

There's also a Kid's Corner option, which enables you to set up a child-friendly user area on the phone, with restricted access to apps.

While things are easy to find once you're on the Settings screen, there are certain things that we wish there was a shortcut to, for example turning 3G and Wi-Fi on and off.

If you leave the screen to time out on its own then rather than turning off completely it displays a Glance Clock, which is a screen with the time on it.

This isn't a lock screen as such, in fact it's not a screen that you can really interact with at all - so swiping achieves nothing, though a double-tap will take you to the actual lock screen.

That in itself can take a bit of getting used to, but on the whole we quite like it.

Phones are increasingly replacing watches, and if you just want to check the time then having to turn the screen on feels like an unnecessary extra step.

Thankfully if you don't like it you can disable it from the Settings screen. You'll also find options there to have it dimmed (and a rather natty red) at certain times, such as night, or set it to turn off after 15 minutes.

Actually operating the Nokia Lumia 925 is a dream, because it's generally very fast and smooth to navigate despite the fairly low specs.

Saying that though, when using the Settings screen you'll sometimes have to wait a second or two for it to load a menu, which is just not on, since things like that should be instant.

It's also mostly very intuitive, and at 4.5 inches the screen is a comfortable size to use.

It looks good too, with bright and colourful images, though the resolution isn't quite a match for many recent Android handsets such as the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the difference is noticeable, with neither images nor text looking quite as sharp on Nokia's handset.

On the other hand, the screen on the Nokia Lumia 925 does have some things going for it, thanks to the return of the clever PureMotion HD+ ClearBlack technology used by the Nokia Lumia 920.

Among other things this makes the screen impressively viewable in direct light.

It still looks a bit washed out, but it's perfectly useable and that's an improvement over most phones.

It can also be used with gloves on, or at least in theory it can be. In practice we tried three different pairs of gloves of different thicknesses, and it only responded to the very thinnest, so if you have visions of taking this on the slopes and using it with ski gloves on, then think again.

Contacts and calling

Contacts

In general we're quite fond of the way Microsoft handles contacts with Windows Phone 8, and the implementation on the Nokia Lumia 925 is no different.

Contacts are found in the People app, which itself has three different main screens.

The most important one is an alphabetical list of all your contacts, complete with display pictures pulled from connected social networks.

There's a plus button at the bottom of the screen that enables you to add new contacts, and there are fields for not just name, number and email but also address, anniversary, job title and more besides.

There's also a search button at the bottom of the screen that enables you to type out a contact's name to find them.

To the right of that there are three little dots that you can tap to go to the Settings screen. This contains options to sort contacts by first or last name, add accounts and choose which accounts to show contacts from.

Back on the main People screen, if you long-press someone's name you'll get options to edit their details or pin them to your start screen, making it quicker to call them in future.

A quick tap on a contact will open their details, displaying their phone number and any other information that you've filled in or that's been imported from Facebook and the like.

Speaking of Facebook, the Nokia Lumia 925 and indeed Windows Phone 8 in general do a great job of integrating it into the handset.

From a contact's screen you can see their display picture and most recent status update, and you can even write on their Facebook wall without leaving that screen.

If they have any addresses listed you can also tap on them to bring them up on a map. That's in addition to more expected options such as being able to call, text or email them by tapping on the relevant field.

At the bottom of this screen there are options to pin them to the start screen, link them to another contact - which is useful if you have more than one entry for a single person from different social networks - or edit their information.

Swiping left or right will bring you even more in-depth social network integration, since you can view What's New on their Facebook timeline or Twitter feed and reply to or like any status updates. You can also see photos they've uploaded and view any recent calls or text conversations between the two of you.

Back on the Nokia Lumia 925's main People screen again there are similar things to be found if you swipe left or right from here.

You can see a combined view of recent updates from all your contacts on a What's New screen, as well as seeing a list of any contacts that you've recently interacted with.

Finally there's a rooms and groups screen, which enables you to create separate groups for contacts, for example Friends or Family, and if you make a 'room' for them you can share calendars, notes and photos and have group chats with everyone in the room.

All in all it's a superb implementation, it's intuitive, requires minimal set up since most of the data is pulled from accounts that you already have and enables you to stay in touch with people through multiple channels all in one place.

Calling

Calling someone can be done in one of two ways on the Nokia Lumia 925. Either just tap on a contact's phone number from the People screen or head to the Phone screen, where you can use the dial pad to type in a number.

Unfortunately this is one of the few failings of contact integration on the handset, because the dialler doesn't support smart dialling, so even if you're calling a number that's already in your phone book it won't bring up suggestions as you type, or even link the number to a contact's name once you've typed it in full.

Similarly, although the dial pad does list letters next to each number, you can't use them to type a contact's name in.

It's not Nokia's fault, it's just how Windows Phone 8 is, but it's a fairly large oversight by Microsoft.

Aside from the dial pad, the Nokia Lumia 925's Phone screen also has an icon that you can tap on to call your voicemail, one that takes you to your phonebook on the People screen and a search button that enables you to search for a contact or number in your call history or phonebook.

Speaking of call history, that's what's displayed whenever you launch the phone app, and tapping on an entry in the history will take you to the caller's profile where you can then call or text them back.

Call quality on the Nokia Lumia 925 is just as good as it was on the Nokia Lumia 920.

There was never an instance when we couldn't hear the person at the other end of the line clearly, and they always reported that they could hear us fine too.

Even the speaker phone worked quite well, though some of the clarity was lost. We didn't suffer any dropped calls either, so all in all the handset put in a good performance.

Messaging

The Messaging app is the go-to location for text messaging on the Nokia Lumia 925.

From there you can see a list of conversation threads, and if you've linked your phone up to Facebook you'll even get access to your Facebook chat conversations here.

At the bottom of the screen there are options to send a new message, delete conversations, change your chat status or go into a Settings screen where you can enable delivery reports for messages.

If you swipe right you can see which of your contacts are currently online on Facebook chat and tap on them to chat over the internet.

Of course if you'd rather be anti-social you can either change your own status to offline or turn off Facebook chat altogether.

Back on the threads screen, if you long-press a conversation you'll find an option to delete it or you can tap on it to open it and view all the messages between you and that contact.

These are displayed in coloured speech bubbles, the colour of which will match the colour theme of the phone - which in itself can be changed from the main Settings screen.

There's an empty speech bubble at the bottom of the screen that you can tap on to bring up the keyboard and type out a new message.

Just below that speech bubble (and the keyboard if it's open) there are several little icons. The one on the left is used to send a message once you've composed it, and next to that there's a paperclip that enables you to attach a picture, video, voice note or contact to the message.

And to the right of the paperclip icon there's a microphone icon that you can use to dictate a message rather than typing it. This works well, but - call us old-fashioned - we'd always rather just tap the message out anyway.

The other form of messaging on offer is email, and the email app looks remarkably similar to the text message one, with a black and white inbox listing all your emails, which you can then tap on to read.

The emails themselves are fitted to the screen, making them easy to read with minimal scrolling. There are also clearly labelled icons to reply to an email, delete it or move on to the next one.

Rather than viewing your whole inbox you can also filter emails by unread, flagged or urgent, plus it's possible to view any other folders in your email account too.

Icons at the bottom of the screen enable you to compose a new email, refresh the page, delete emails or search for a specific email. You can also get to the email Settings screen by tapping on the three white dots at the bottom-right. This has options to change your sync settings or add a new email account.

When sending an email on the Nokia Lumia 925, things are as simple as you'd hope, with a subject box, address box and an area to enter the body of the email. You then just add an attachment (if you want) and tap Send.

As with text messages, there's also an option to speak the content of the email to the phone rather than typing it yourself. It's an elegant app and it works well.

The other factor to messaging is the keyboard itself, which in the Nokia Lumia 925's case is very accurate and big enough to not be a struggle to use. It will also suggest words as you type, and take a good stab at auto-correcting any typos.

Our only real issue with it is the lack of haptic feedback, since that can really help to give the sense that you're actually pressing a button, though it has little bearing on the accuracy or overall usability of the keyboard.

Internet

Not only does the Nokia Lumia 925 support 3G and dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, but it's also 4G enabled.

Your main outlet for all these data connections will be Internet Explorer, since that's the browser that ships with the phone, and there aren't really many alternatives available on the store.

That alone might be a deal breaker for some, but if you can stomach Internet Explorer it's not actually all that bad.

There's an address bar at the bottom of the screen, which doubles as a search bar, while to the left of that there is the choice of a Stop/Refresh button, a Tabs button or a Favourites button.

Which of these there is depends on how you configure the browser in its Settings screen, but it defaults to a Stop/Refresh button. In one sense it's nice to have the choice, but one of our qualms with the mobile version of Internet Explorer is that you can only get quick access to one of these at a time, which is annoying because they're all things that we use a lot.

To the right of the address bar there are three little dots, which when tapped on display a pop-up menu with options for tabs, Favourites and/or Refresh, since whichever one has been given a shortcut on the main screen is understandably not listed here.

Additionally, there are options to add a page to your Favourites, share the page, pin it to the start screen, search for a certain word or phrase on the page or go to the main browser Settings menu.

As we mentioned above, the Settings menu enables you to toggle what action the button to the left of the address bar performs, but it also enables you to pick whether you want websites to default to mobile or desktop pages, delete your history, block cookies and pick whether your default search provider should be Bing or Google.

The Favourites screen is just a black and white list, enabling you to tap on pages to go to them. The tabs page is slightly more attractive, because it displays small snapshots of all your open tabs. It also has an option at the bottom to open a new tab.

Scrolling around pages on the browser is generally fast and smooth, and text tends to be perfectly readable, though if it's not you can pinch or double-tap to zoom in and out. If you tap on a link it will open it, while if you long-press it a little box will appear with options to open it in a new tab, copy it or share it.

Text and image-heavy pages make the failings of the screen quite clear, since its resolution is just not up to the standards that we'd expect from a flagship phone. We're not in eye strain territory and it's not even particularly ugly, but things are noticeably less sharp than they could be.

It's not the fastest at loading pages either, since desktop sites often took over 20 seconds to fully load using Wi-Fi.

In fairness you can start reading them while they're still loading, and it's often just adverts that are taking the time, but it still seems slow.

However, mobile sites only take around six seconds to load on the Nokia Lumia 925, which is much more tolerable.

Using 3G caused mobile sites to take about twice as long to load (so roughly 12 seconds), though surprisingly the impact on desktop sites was minimal, only adding two or three seconds to the overall load time. Unfortunately we weren't able to test it on 4G, since we didn't have a compatible SIM card available.

Ultimately the Nokia Lumia 925 delivers a solid browsing experience, but one that's held back from excellence by a slightly underwhelming screen resolution and a lack of browser choice.

Camera

The Nokia Lumia 925 has an 8.7MP snapper. That might be some way south of the 13MP Samsung Galaxy S4, but don't count it out yet. For one thing, it uses Carl Zeiss optics, which should be enough for camera fans to sit up and take notice. But it also has a bunch of clever options and features. It's also excellent - and we mean excellent - at low light snaps.

There's a dedicated hardware camera button that makes taking photos a breeze and minimises camera shake when you take them. It can also be used to launch the camera from any screen on the Nokia Lumia 925 - even the lock screen - so you'll never miss the chance to capture a moment.

It's worth noting also that the ability to see the screen in bright sunlight can help no end with taking photos, because it makes it a lot easier to compose a shot when you can actually see how things look on the screen.

If you just launch the main camera app things look fairly normal. You can tap to focus and there are a few scene modes to choose from such as sports, night, close-up or auto.

You can also turn flash on or off, change the ISO, exposure value, white balance and aspect ratio, but that's all become more or less a staple of smartphone cameras. That said, it's quick and easy to change options and settings and it takes pretty good pictures even when you stick to this mode.

Things get a lot more interesting, though, when you delve into the Lenses menu. This is nothing new for Windows Phone 8 - essentially each lens setting adds new features or options to the camera - but the Nokia Lumia 925 comes with more than most.

First up there's Bing Vision, which can be used to scan barcodes and QR codes - so it doesn't actually take photos but it can be quite useful in its own right, and in our experience it quickly and easily scanned anything we threw at it.

Then there's Cinemagraph, which combines photo and video to create a short clip. Essentially it captures several seconds of footage that then loops to make a moving photo. You can tweak it by adjusting the start and end point, changing the speed or adding filters and then you can share it over social networks or by email.

It's undoubtedly a gimmick, and we're not sure it will get much serious use as the result is pretty lo-res, but it has the potential to add an extra element to photographs - bringing life to an otherwise static image.

Up next there's Panorama, which creates a wide panorama shot of your surroundings by taking multiple photographs and stitching them together. It works quite well too.

Finally there's Nokia Smart Cam, and that's really the headline feature of the camera. Essentially it takes a series of images in quick succession and then chooses the best for you to save. This is really handy, since your first picture isn't always any good, and it means you don't have to manually take several pictures of the same thing.

But that's not all. If your pictures contain movement it can also create an action shot by splicing the images together to create a sort of motion trail where you can see the same action at different points. So far example if you made an action shot of someone riding a bike it would feature them and their bike several times over in different places.

In practice it seems to require quite a lot of movement for it to even think about creating an action shot, and if there's even a small amount of camera shake it can mess up the image. But it's still a nice feature.

Nokia Smart Cam can also pick out faces to ensure that the image you end up with always captures the moment when people have their eyes open and are smiling.

Finally it can also remove unwanted movement from a shot, so if for example there's a car or cyclist in the background of your picture - which not only might be in the way of the view but could also be causing motion blur - the camera can remove them.

You can choose to have Smart Camera enabled by default, which helps to get the best out of the top-end features. It's the same as HTC's Zoe feature in a way, which snaps three-second clips instead of a photo and allows you to do the same thing - albeit far more effectively.

One insanely annoying feature is that the Smart Camera will show you previews of removed objects or action shots, and yet when you tap to open them, the Lumia 925 decides it can't do it. We wanted to scream 'JUST SAVE THE PREVIEW, YOU STUPID CAMERA', but we might have been judged by passers-by.

The biggest problem with all of these lenses is that it can take a while to capture images with them, and even longer to process them afterwards, which can be a pain. We can't help but wonder if the mediocre processing specs in the Nokia Lumia 925 are partially to blame for this.

Once you've taken a photo you can edit it in the Creative Studio. As well as giving you options to crop, rotate and remove red eye this also features a number of filters that you can add to an image, and even enables you to remove colour from certain sections while retaining it in others, and to blur parts of the image to draw focus to the non-blurred areas.

For a bundled piece of software, there's a lot more to it than you'd expect.

There's also a secondary 1.3MP front-facing camera, which is likely to be of more use for video than photos, since it can be used for Skype and other video call services.

All in all the camera on the Nokia Lumia 925 is one of, if not the, best we've ever come across on a smartphone. The combination of a wealth of shooting modes and editing tools alongside strong general performance and particularly impressive low light and night time performance makes it a great all-round shooter.

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Cinemagraph shots are basically short looping videos. We're not sure how useful they are, but they work.

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Panoramas come out well, but not really any better than on most other phones that can take them.

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Video

The main camera on the Nokia Lumia 925 can shoot video in 1080p at 30fps. It also has a front-facing camera capable of shooting 720p video at 30fps. That's all par for the course on a flagship phone, and video in general doesn't impress quite as much as stills, but it puts up a reasonable performance.

When you launch the camera app you'll find options to adjust the white balance, turn continuous focus on or off and switch the video quality between 1080p and 720p. You can also turn the video lamp on or off.

Unlike the main camera there aren't any scene modes or fancy features, but that's fine, since such things are less often used on videos.

As with the stills camera, you can use the hardware camera button to start and stop recording, which is a lot easier than tapping around on the screen, particularly as doing the latter can cause camera shake.

Media

The Nokia Lumia 925 makes a fairly good media player, with a big screen for video content and some solid built-in media apps.

The biggest problem it faces is that there's only 16GB of built-in storage and no option to expand that (although a 32GB option is available), meaning that you'll have to think very carefully about which songs and videos you want to store on your phone, because it won't fit many.

Music

We'd wager that music is the multimedia activity that will get the most action on the Nokia Lumia 925, and we're pleased to report that it's handled well.

There are two places to listen to music from.

First up there's Microsoft's Music + Videos app, in which you'll find all of your music sorted alphabetically by artist, song and album and you can also view and create playlists.

The player supports MP3, WAV, eAAC+ and WMA files.

It's not the most attractive media player we've ever seen, since everything is laid out in simple lists, but you do get album artwork in the album view, and it is very easy to navigate.

You can tap on a song to play it, and there are then further options to favourite a track or shuffle the order that songs will play in.

Tapping an icon at the bottom-right of the screen will enable you to share the song over Hotmail or save it to a playlist, and if you have an Xbox Music account you can also start a smart playlist of similar music.

There are also basic lock screen controls enabling you to pause or skip the track without unlocking your phone, though we wish there was a way to control the music from any screen, like the notification screen controls on Android smartphones.

When playing music through the Nokia Lumia 925's speakers you can get it up to a decent volume, but as with most phone speakers outside of the HTC One the quality just isn't all that, leaving music sounding flat and lifeless.

Also, because the speakers are on the back you'll probably want to place the phone face-down when listening to music to maximise the volume.

However, the vibrations coming from the speakers at this orientation cause the phone to slowly shuffle along whatever surface it's on, which could end in a fall if it's on a table or other raised surface.

Listening to music through headphones leads to much better sound quality and also gives you access to a bunch of audio settings that aren't otherwise available.

These include the ability to choose a preset for the equaliser or customise it yourself, along with an enhancement that you can enable if you're using Dolby headphones.

That's all well and good, but to actually get to these settings you need to leave the player, go into the main Settings menu and scroll all the way down to Audio. A shortcut from the player would be much appreciated.

Thankfully the other player - Nokia Music - does have in-built access to these settings.

Aside from that it's both visually and functionally very similar to the Music + Videos player, though it has its own store and Mix Radio.

This has loads of radio mixes, such as Rock or Dance, and also enables you to create your own mix of music that's similar to that of a specific artist.

It doesn't just use your own music for these mixes either, it uses Nokia's own library of songs and you can listen for free.

There is also a premium version of the service - called Nokia Music+ - that enables you to download mixes, skip as many tracks as you want and more for £3.99/US$3.99 per month.

Back in the main Music + Videos app there are a few other options too, such as a link to the store where you can buy new music, with individual tracks usually going for around 99p / US$1.29 / $2.19, while albums tend to cost around £7-8 / US$8-12 / AU$13-15.

There's a reasonable selection on offer and it's easy enough to navigate, plus you're not locked in to using it as it's perfectly possible to hook the phone up to your computer and copy music across or buy music from Nokia's store.

There's also an FM radio option in the Music + Videos app, which will work just as long as you've got some ear or headphones plugged in.

It's very basic though, so you can swipe across the tuner to find stations and once you do you can add them to your favourites for easy access later.

But that's it, there's no easy to navigate list of stations, stations aren't named even once you tune in to them, it can't record and there doesn't appear to be any way to listen to it through the phone's speakers.

Video

As you probably guessed, video is also handled by the Music + Videos app. There's a lot less to this than there is to the music - all you get are images of any videos on your device, which you can then tap on to play.

The phone supports MP4, H.264, H.263 and WMV video files, and once playing something you can pause it, skip to the next video or fit it to the screen, but that's all you get.

There aren't any real options to play with and you can't download movies or anything from the store, so you'll have to either film them yourself or copy them across from a computer.

The Nokia Lumia 925 is not a bad little device to watch videos on, but we've definitely seen better. At 4.5 inches the screen is a reasonable size, but while it strikes a good balance between usability and portability it's obviously not quite as good for video as the likes of the 5-inch Samsung Galaxy S4, let alone the 5.5-inch Samsung Galaxy Note 2.

We're also left wishing once again that the screen was just a little higher resolution to give us a better HD experience. However, the ability to view the screen in direct sunlight does give it an edge as a portable media player, since you're only likely to use your phone for video when you're out and about..

The lack of storage could be a bit of a killer for video though, since with only 16GB to split between everything you're not going to fit many films on it. At least that's not a problem for streaming videos over YouTube or Netflix, but there aren't any built-in streaming services, so you'll have to turn to the store to get them.

Photos

Photos are handled by the Nokia Lumia 925's Photo app, funnily enough. This sorts photos by album, date or people in them, or gives you the option to just view everything on your camera roll.

Plus you can also quickly view any favourites, see any new photos uploaded to Facebook by friends or launch any photo apps that you have installed on your phone.

When viewing a photo you can share it via picture message, social network or email, rotate it, 'fix' it, crop it, save it to SkyDrive, set it as your lock screen background, add it to your favourites or delete it.

Photos look quite good on the screen, with bright yet generally quite natural colours, but yet again we long for a higher resolution.

Out of the box there are two additional photo apps installed on the Nokia Lumia 925. There's PhotoBeamer, which enables you to display your images on a friend's phone.

Then there's Creative Studio, which enables you to edit the photos that you've taken beyond the basic cropping and fixing options found in the gallery. There are quite a few options available here, to start with you can add a filter to your photo - for example Silver or Opal.

Then you can add blur to certain areas of the image or focus in on a specific part. You can also make part of the image black and white while retaining colours in other areas using a tool called Colour Pop.

You can make a collage of multiple images, change the colour balance, brightness, clarity and vibrancy, and you can crop and rotate images and remove red eye.

It's definitely one of the fullest featured photo editing studios that we've ever seen on a phone and it's quite easy to use too, enabling you to make fairly precise alterations by zooming in to the area you want to edit. With Creative Studio onboard, the Nokia Lumia 925 handles photos well.

Battery life and connectivity

Battery life

The Nokia Lumia 925 has a 2000mAh battery, which is exactly the same size as the battery found in the Nokia Lumia 920. Unfortunately we weren't too thrilled with the battery life of the Nokia Lumia 920 and you can't remove the battery either, so if you had thoughts of carrying around a spare that won't be an option.

The good news is that in practice we didn't find the battery to be too much of a problem. It's not brilliant but we reckon it's an improvement over the Nokia Lumia 920.

The battery stats released by Nokia support that too, since they claim it can manage up to 440 hours of 3G standby time or 12 hours 40 minutes of 3G talk time, both of which are higher than the corresponding figures for the Nokia Lumia 920.

Curiously though, it apparently can't manage to play music for quite as long, coming in at 55 hours compared to 67 hours on the Nokia Lumia 920.

When testing the Nokia Lumia 925 we found that the battery would just about get through the day, but only just. To be fair though we were using it a lot more than most people probably use their phones on a day to day basis.

With more frugal use you might get a day and a half, but we'd be surprised if you manage more than that unless you really don't touch it. Nokia has seen fit to include a battery saver option though, which when activated will turn off most background processes to conserve battery.

We played a 90 minute video on the handset with Wi-Fi turned on, the screen at full brightness and emails and social networks set to automatically push to the phone. The Nokia Lumia 925 started at 100% battery and dropped to 83% by the end, which is reasonable but not amazing. It matches the likes of the Galaxy S3 though, which many have found to be an adequate companion for all-day use.

We'd say the battery isn't really a liability, but if you're a power user you're going to want something with more juice.

Connectivity

The Nokia Lumia 925 has most of the connectivity options you could hope for. There's dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, DLNA support, the ability to set up a Wi-Fi hotspot, GPS, 3G and even 4G. There's obviously also Bluetooth, though it's version 3.0 rather than 4.0, which excludes any future low-power BT sensors.

Then there's NFC support, enabling you to share images, websites and more with other NFC-enabled devices by tapping them together, or more precisely by turning NFC and Bluetooth on, selecting Share, then Tap + Share, then tapping them together, so it's not quite as seamless as we'd like.

The only features notable for their absence are an infrared port - which we weren't really expecting but which some other high-end handsets, such as the HTC One, have started including - and wireless charging, which was a feature of the Nokia Lumia 920 so it's a shame that it's not included here too. However, removing it likely helped get the weight down, which was probably a worthwhile trade off.

All the connectivity options can easily be turned on and off from the Settings screen, though we wish that it was possible to toggle some of the more frequently used ones either from the Start screen or better yet from anywhere, since it's a pain to have to dig into the Settings screen every time you want to turn something on or off.

Getting content on and off the phone is made as straightforward as possible, since it's basically just plug and play - connect the phone to a computer then you can copy and paste or drag and drop to your heart's content. A massive improvement over Windows Phone 7.

Maps and apps

Maps

The Nokia Lumia 925 comes with HERE Maps, which is Nokia's own mapping solution.

It's a pretty good offering, with options to get directions, view traffic data, public transport information or a satellite view of an area.

It will also list nearby places, and you can download maps for offline use, which is very handy when you're travelling. It never had any problem locking on to our location either.

Alongside it there's also HERE Drive, which is a free sat nav app, and is similarly useful.

Like the maps app it can download maps for offline use, plus it can also display maps in either a 2D or 3D view.

Once you set a destination and start driving it will give you both spoken and written instructions, as well as displaying an estimate of your current speed and even an estimated arrival time.

You can change between metric and imperial units, and there are useful extra features such as the ability to show petrol stations and car parks on the map or set an alert to go off if you exceed a certain speed. All in all, for a free offering it's a hugely accomplished app.

Completing the triumvirate of HERE apps, Nokia has also included HERE City Lens on the Lumia 925, which uses your phone's camera and compass to overlay the outside world with markers for places of interest and lead you to them, be they restaurants, museums or shops.

Nokia loves this app, but we're less impressed. We don't need to see where it is, just a list of what's around - the augmented reality element seems more gimmick than useful. It's no better than Google Maps at giving local treasures, so we'd like to see more from the app in the future for us to call it a boon.

Apps

The Nokia Lumia 925 doesn't fare quite so well with other, non-mapping, apps. Most fall into the category of the expected - such as a calendar, a calculator and an alarm clock, all of which are perfectly functional but don't do anything out of the ordinary, or the useless - such as Angry Birds Roost, which is basically just Angry Birds news, ringtones and wallpapers.

Similarly useless is World of Red Bull, which presents news and videos about athletes and sporting events that are sponsored or hosted by Red Bull.

Extreme sports enthusiasts may get some enjoyment out of it but we doubt many people will ever even open it. Plus it doesn't include Sebastian Vettel from Red Bull Racing in F1. What? Why?

It's not a total app write-off though with the Lumia 925, because you also get Data Sense, which is a handy tool for keeping track of how much data you use and ensuring that you don't go over your monthly limit.

There's also Microsoft Office and OneNote, the mobile versions of which while not quite as full featured as their desktop counterparts are still as much as you could ever hope to get from a phone app.

Since many businesses use the desktop versions, having the same software on your phone could come in handy for working on the move.

The biggest problem with apps on the Nokia Lumia 925 is the app store itself, since it's just not all that well stocked.

If we hadn't been spoiled by Apple's App Store and Google Play we might not have minded, but we have and we do.

A lot of major apps are covered, for example you can get YouTube and Facebook, but there's nowhere near the number or variety of apps that we'd like to see.

As we explained in the Introduction page, the way apps are organised on the Nokia Lumia 925 is impressive, though.

Apps are represented by Windows Phone 8 tiles, many of which display live information or pictures, such as the number of unread emails in your inbox or a slideshow of your contacts' photos.

Tap on a tile to launch the app or long-press it to move, resize or remove it.

Official gallery

Verdict

The Nokia Lumia 925 is something of an oddity. For a phone that is presumably meant to be Nokia's latest flagship - as the name and £500 (around US$785/AU$820) price tag would suggest - it's been approached rather conservatively.

The specs are for the most part identical to last year's model and are really starting to feel a bit dated in the face of quad-core powerhouses such as the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4.

In fact, in a few ways it's actually worse than the Nokia Lumia 920, because it has less built-in storage and no wireless charging.

There have been a few improvements, for example the build quality is now much more premium (though still not up to the standards of the HTC One) and the already great camera has been slightly improved. But that only amounts to two real changes, which isn't much at all for a new flagship phone, let alone one commanding such a high price tag.

We liked

The Nokia Lumia 925 is a great looking phone. It's slimmer and lighter than the Nokia Lumia 920, the metal band running around the edge does wonders for it and it's the first phone the Finnish company has made in a long time that looks like it was designed for adults.

The camera is superb too, not only in terms of its raw performance but also in the sheer number of options, modes and effects you can play with. Some of it is gimmicky, sure, but there's so much there that you're bound to find something to love. It's not re-inventing the wheel though, as Nokia has lobbed this functionality in with the 920. It is better-packaged, though.

Nokia's HERE Maps and HERE Drive navigation apps are brilliant additions to the stock Microsoft offerings, while Nokia Music's Mix Radio puts millions of tracks at your fingertips for free.

Like all Windows Phone 8 handsets, the Nokia Lumia 925 also does a great job of contacts, messaging and social network integration. And it's a minor point, but we are quite fond of the Glance Clock, despite feeling like a lock-screen-on-top-of-a-lock-screen.

We disliked

The processor and screen resolution on the Nokia Lumia 925 are both distinctly lacking. Neither has seen any upgrade since the Nokia Lumia 920 and both are starting to feel decidedly mid-range. It's noticeable in use too, where things just don't look as sharp as they could and the phone will sometimes struggle with even minor things, such as navigating the Settings menu or rendering Nokia's Smart Camera... the latter particularly frustrating.

That aside, there's little else to dislike beyond the fact that it just hasn't seen much of an upgrade from the Nokia Lumia 920. By far the biggest improvement is build quality, but it's also a departure from the bright iconic colours Nokia has become known for, so it might not be to everyone's taste.

Even if you love the new build it's questionable whether that's really enough to justify the premium price tag, especially when the Nokia Lumia 920 can now be had for a lot less.

We're also really disappointed to see that in some ways the Nokia Lumia 925 is actually inferior to the 920, since its storage has been halved to just 16GB and wireless charging has been removed.

There's no microSD card slot either, despite the fact that even low-end models such as the Nokia Lumia 520 feature one, so you really are stuck with just 16GB of memory.

Final verdict

The Nokia Lumia 925 is undeniably a great phone in its own right, but it's just not a big enough improvement over the Nokia Lumia 920 for there to be any reason to buy it if you own last year's model. Even if you don't, you might be better off buying the Nokia Lumia 920, since it's substantially cheaper at around £330/US$400/AU$420 SIM-free.

With dated specs the Nokia Lumia 925 is definitely a case of style over substance. If it was priced around the same as the Nokia Lumia 920 that would be fine, but it isn't. And while it's still one of the best Windows Phone 8 handsets available, it's still got a long way to go to catch up to the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S4, the HTC One and even the iPhone 5, unless you're a particular fan of Windows Phone.

Some call Windows Phone refreshing, but it does still come with limitations and lacks a certain fluidity that Nokia hasn't managed to fix with the Lumia 925. This is a good phone, sure, but as a flagship we need to have our socks blown off, and at last check they were still firmly on our feet.

Introduction

Like Panasonic's other compact system cameras (CSCs), the Panasonic G6 is built following the Micro Four Thirds standard.

This means that it has a 17.3 x 13mm (0.68 x 0.51-inch) sensor, which is smaller than the APS-C format sensors in cameras such as the Canon EOS 700D (22.3 x 14.9mm) and Nikon D5200 (23.5 x 15.6mm), which are both DSLRs, and the Sony NEX-5R (23.5 x 15.6mm) and Samsung NX300 (23.5 x 15.7mm), which are CSCs.

However, using the Micro Fours Thirds (MFT) standard means that the Panasonic G6 is compatible with Olympus MFT lenses as well as a growing collection from third party manufacturers such as Sigma.

Because Panasonic and Olympus were first and second, respectively, into the CSC market, both companies have had time to develop the system, and there's an extensive array of optics available.

Panasonic has used a mini-DSLR style for the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G6, and unlike many compact system cameras, it has a viewfinder built in, though the mirrorless design naturally means that this is an electronic device.

Like the Panasonic G5 before it, the Panasonic G6's LCD screen is touch-sensitive and is mounted on an articulating joint, so you can twist it around to get a clear view from a range of angles.

The Panasonic G6 sits below the Panasonic GH3 in the company's CSC lineup, and it's aimed at enthusiast photographers who want to shoot a range of subjects but want a smaller, lighter camera system than the average DSLR kit.

Features

Although Panasonic has stuck with the same 16.05 million pixel Live MOS sensor in the Lumix G6 that it used in the Panasonic G5 (and Panasonic GH2), it has used a new, more powerful Venus Engine, a better touchscreen and an improved electronic viewfinder (EVF).

According to Panasonic, the compact system camera's new processing engine enables the G6 to produce better quality images, and in turn enables a wider extended sensitivity range of ISO 160-25600.

In addition, the manufacturer says the new engine enables faster autofocusing, especially in low light. It does this by dropping the readout from the sensor from 120fps to 15fps, making it eight times more sensitive. Panasonic has also worked to improve the G6's ability to track moving subjects, as well as boosting the maximum continuous shooting speed to 7fps.

While the Panasonic G5 has a 1,440,00- dot LCD in its electronic viewfinder, the Panasonic G6 has a 1,440,000-dot OLED finder, which is brighter and should provide a clearer view.

Meanwhile, the touchscreen is a capacitive device rather than resistive, so it responds to a touch of a finger rather than requiring a press.

As on the Panasonic G5, there's a collection of Creative Control modes with options such as Toy Camera and Impressive Art that adjust the processing of the images to give them a particular look. These are accessed via the main mode dial and can be used when shooting raw as well as JPEG files, giving you a 'clean' image as well as one with the effect applied.

Having a raw file as well as a more heavily processed JPEG makes the Creative Control options more attractive to enthusiast photographers who want to option of working on their images post-capture.

The downside to using the Creative Control options is that there's no control over key features such as aperture and shutter speed. However, the Photo Style options Standard, Vivid, Natural, Monochrome, Scenery, Portrait and Custom can be used in any exposure mode (apart from Creative Control) with full control over the camera settings, and they work with raw and JPEG file recording.

Panasonic has also given the G6 Wi-Fi connectivity, and an NFC chip means that it is possible to connect quickly and easily to other NFC devices such as an Android smartphone or tablet.

As yet Apple hasn't included an NFC chip in its iPhones, but rumours are rife that one will feature in the iPhone 5S/6.

The Panasonic G6 price is £629/US$749.99 (around AU$989) including a 14-42mm kit lens.

Build and handling

Panasonic has made a few subtle but pleasing changes to the appearance of the G5 for this new G6. For a start the camera looks and feels a little more serious than the Panasonic G5. The viewfinder bump is less pronounced and the texture of the body surface has changed.

The silver controls on the back of the Panasonic G5 are now black on the Panasonic G6, giving it a higher quality appearance.

There are also a couple of additional function buttons, bringing the total number of physical function buttons on the back of the camera to five. These enable greater customisation of the Panasonic G6, making it quicker and easier to use once you've set it to your preferences.

The physical buttons all have their default settings indicated next to them, and in the most part they work well. However, we found it useful to use Fn3, which is the delete button in review mode, to access the flash exposure compensation control in record mode

It's very easy to change the purpose of the Fn button, because once the option is selected in the Menu the screen displays an image of the camera with the buttons and their function highlighted. Touching any of the icons reveals the customisation options available.

Sticking with the subject of customisation, we were surprised to find that Panasonic hasn't continued with the customisable format of the Quick Menu. This is now fixed, which is a shame because the main menu doesn't have a customisable screen either.

On the plus side, most of the options that you need to access regularly can be reached via physical buttons or the quick menu, so you don't need to delve into the full menu very often once the camera is set up.

One issue we had with the G6's control arrangement was that we occasionally changed the on-screen display by accidentally pressing the Display button just beneath the thumb-rest.

As on the top of the Panasonic G5, there's a Function Lever on the top-plate of the Panasonic G6, just behind the shutter release button. When one of Panasonic's powerzoom lenses is mounted, this can be used to change focal length. It can also be used to adjust the exposure compensation.

If you regularly switch between powerzoom and non-powerzoom lenses you may find it best to set this lever to adjust the exposure compensation, to avoid its function from changing depending on the lens that's mounted.

While we found the Function Lever provides a very quick way of adjusting exposure, it seems to confuse inexperienced photographers because it's more prominent than the shutter release button. If you ever hand the camera to a non-photographer to take a shot, the first thing they do is move the lever backwards and forwards, adjusting the exposure as they go.

In addition, the Panasonic G6's electronic viewfinder (EVF) has been changed to an OLED unit that is brighter than an LCD finder. Although the type of device has changed, its resolution is the same (1,440,000 dots) as the Panasonic G5's EVF.

While its faint grid-texture and a contrast shift means you are aware that you are using an electronic viewfinder rather than an optical one, the EVF provides a very clear view, with lots of sharp detail and natural colours. It also has the benefit of showing how the image will appear when it is captured, taking into account any changes in exposure and white balance.

Another key upgrade made for the Panasonic G6 is the switch to a 3-inch electrostatic touchscreen, which is much more sensitive than the resistive touchscreen on the Panasonic G5. This makes making settings selections and adjustments quicker than before, putting the Panasonic G6's screen's response on a par with that of the Panasonic GH3.

It's especially useful when using Touchpad AF, which enables the AF point to be selected by touching the screen while composing images in the EVF. It's a significant improvement on the Panasonic G5.

We found the main LCD screen also provides a clear view even in quite bright light, and because it is mounted on an articulating hinge it makes shooting from awkward angles much easier than normal. Touch Shutter mode, which triggers the camera to focus on the point selected by a touch on the screen and then fire the shutter, is especially useful when shooting from a very low or high angle.

At times, however, it would be helpful if the on-screen digital level could be made a bit clearer, because its not always easy to see it change from yellow to green to indicate the camera is level when the screen is being viewed from an angle.

The navigation controls on the back of the Panasonic G6 sit low into the camera body, which initially makes them a little hard to identify with your thumb when holding the camera to your eye. However, after a little experience they become easier to locate.

Panasonic has introduced a new app that enables G6 users to control the camera remotely via your iPhone, iPad or Android device. It enables a similar level of control to the Lumix Link app that works with the Panasonic GH3 with the focus point, exposure and white balance all being remotely controllable.

The Panasonic G6 has Wi-Fi connectivity and an NFC chip built-in. The NFC chip enables quick connection with NFC-enabled smartphones and tablets. As yet Apple hasn't included an NFC chip in any of its devices, but you can still connect to the Panasonic G6 wirelessly.

Panasonic's Image App is particularly useful for anyone who wants to be able to shoot while they are away from their camera, with a Live View image being displayed on the phone or tablet screen.

Unlike some other apps, Image App gives the photographer remote control over the exposure, white balance and drive mode settings and the focus point can be set with the touch of a finger on the tablet or phone screen.

Images can also be transferred wirelessly to the smart device at full or reduced resolution, and from here they can be shared. Once you've set up a Lumix Club account and registered the destination Facebook, Twitter or other social media or image sharing account it's also possible to post images directly to these sites.

While the Wi-Fi connectivity is a bonus, it isn't especially intuitive to set up and use the first time, even when connecting with an NFC device. Panasonic's Lumix Club website also isn't especially inviting or user-friendly.

Performance

Our images from the Panasonic G6 generally look very good, they are well exposed, have good, natural colours and plenty of detail.

After testing the Canon 700D and Canon 100D recently it was nice to use the Panasonic G6's 1728-zone Intelligent Multiple zone metering system, which gives more consistent results in high contrast situations.

In fact during this test we found little reason to use centre weighted or spot-metering, because the general-purpose multiple-zone system does so well. That said, it's not completely foolproof, and we occasionally had to adjust the exposure compensation, but it was usually only by 1/3EV.

Although the Panasonic G6 lagged some way behind the Olympus PEN Lite E-PL5 and in some cases the Sony NEX-6 in our dynamic range lab tests, its images look natural, with a wide range of tones and smooth gradations. A dynamic range of around 10EV in JPEGs taken at up to ISO 800 is pretty good, and the end result is images that have a good level of contrast.

Colours straight from the camera are also good, and the automatic white balance system copes very well with a range of lighting conditions, only struggling in low artificial light. While there's a range of preset white balance settings, it's so easy to set a custom white balance value that it makes sense to use this in artificial light.

Panasonic has used the same sensor in the G6 as it has in the G5, and our lab tests show that the raw files (after conversion to TIFF) have almost identical signal to noise ratio and dynamic range. However, it seems Panasonic has been able to eke out a little more detail from the G6's files, and it achieves higher resolution scores from ISO 800 and above.

Our JPEG images taken at ISO 1600 have lots of detail, with very little sign of noise and just a hint of smoothing visible at 100% on the screen. Pushing up to ISO 6400 increases the amount of smoothing that's visible at 100%, but images still look very good when sized to make A3 (16.5 x 11.7-inch) prints.

Raw files can be processed to reveal more detail than the JPEGs, but this is at the expense of noise, which becomes more visible.

Panasonic supplies Silkypix Developer Studio software for raw file conversion. While this is a comprehensive image editing package, it isn't especially tailored to the camera in the same way that the software that's supplied with Canon and Nikon DSLRs is. Consequently, you can't make in-camera-like changes to raw files.

However, in reality many Panasonic G6 users are only likely to use the Silkypix software until the raw file conversion component of their preferred image editing software, perhaps Adobe Photoshop Elements or Lightroom has been updated, so it's not a major deal.

Panasonic's claims for the G6's AF system are borne out, as well as being fast and accurate it is better able to focus in low light and follow moving subjects than its predecessor. It only really struggles to find its target in very low lighting situations that would also trouble an entry- or enthusiast-level DSLR's phase detection AF system.

The AF Tracking mode still isn't able to keep up with subjects moving faster than walking pace. But if 1-Area AF and continuous AF mode is selected and you keep the active AF over the subject, the Panasonic G6 can focus the lens very quickly and keep up with fast moving subjects.

The Panasonic G6 might not be our first choice of camera for shooting sport, but it is certainly capable of doing so, and can produce some great results.

Noise and dynamic range

We shoot a specially designed chart in carefully controlled conditions and the resulting images are analysed using DXO Analyzer software to generate the data to produce the graphs below.

A high signal to noise ratio (SNR) indicates a cleaner and better quality image.

For more more details on how to interpret our test data, check out our full explanation of our noise and dynamic range tests.

Here we compare the Panasonic G6 with the Sony NEX-6, Olympus PEN Lite E-PL5 and Panasonic G5. The Panasonic G6 has the greatest sensitivity range of all the cameras here.

JPEG signal to noise ratio

These results show that the Panasonic G6's JPEG files show a weaker signal to noise ratio than those from the Panasonic G5 at the bottom and top ends of the sensitivity scale, but are stronger at ISO 400 and 800. At ISO 1600 and 3200 their scores are extremely similar. JPEGs from the G6 contain slightly greater signal to noise ratios than those from the Sony NEX-6 at ISO 200, then similar levels at ISO 400 and 800, before falling behind at ISO 1600 and above. Similarly, the G6's JPEGs beat the Olympus PEN Lite E-PL5's for signal to noise ratio at ISO 200-800, but fall behind at ISO 1600 and above.

Raw signal to noise ratio

Scores for signal to noise ratios of the TIFF images (after conversion from raw) are much easier to follow, with TIFFs from the Panasonic G6 showing every so slightly weaker signal to noise ratios than those from the Panasonic G5 at every sensitivity setting, and significantly weaker ratios than those from the Sony NEX-6 and Olympus PEN Lite E-PL5 at every sensitivity setting.

JPEG dynamic range

As we can see from this chart, the Panasonic G6's JPEGs contain more dynamic range than the Panasonic G5's at every sensitivity but ISO 1600 and 3200. The G6's JPEGs also show greater dynamic range than those from the Sony NEX-6 at ISO 200 and 800, but they're weaker at other sensitivities, while JPEGs from the Olympus PEN Lite E-PL5 outperform the G6's JPEGs at every sensitivity setting.

Raw dynamic range

Looking similar to the other TIFF results, this chart indicates that the Panasonic G6's TIFF images (after conversion from raw) contain similar levels of dynamic range to those from the Panasonic G5, at every sensitivity setting, and are well and truly beaten by the TIFFs from the Sony NEX-6 and Olympus PEN Lite E-PL5 at every sensitivity.

Image quality and resolution

As part of our image quality testing for the Panasonic G6, we've shot our resolution chart.

If you view our crops of the resolution chart's central section at 100% (or Actual Pixels) you will see that, for example, at ISO 160 the Panasonic G6 is capable of resolving up to around 24 (line widths per picture height x100) in its highest quality JPEG files.

For a full explanation of what our resolution charts mean, and how to read them, check out our full explanation of our camera testing resolution charts.

Examining images of the chart taken at each sensitivity setting reveals the following resolution scores in line widths per picture height x100:

JPEG

Full ISO 160 image, see the cropped (100%) versions below.

ISO 160, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200, score: 20 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400, score: 18 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800, score: 14 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 25600, score: 10 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Raw

ISO 160, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400, score: 18 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800, score: 16 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 25600, score: 10 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Sample images

Click here to see the full resolution image

We shot this image through a light tent to keep reflections under control and it was useful to be able to control the camera via the touchscreen rather than have to find the buttons under the tent. The square crop was set in-camera and proved useful for getting the composition just right.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Exposure here was reduced by 1/3EV to intensify the colours a little and avoid any loss of highlight data. The 16:9 crop was set in-camera, because it suits the scene.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Shooting at f/2.8 when using Panasonic's 45mm macro lens (effective focal length 90mm) has restricted the depth of field nicely here.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Using the Low Key Creative Control Mode has created a moodier shot.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Pushing the contrast setting of the Monochrome Photo Style to its maximum value produced a more graphic shot.

Click here to see the full resolution image

The articulating LCD proves very useful when you want to shoot from very low angles like this. If the camera is on a tripod you can focus very precisely by enlarging the on-screen image and focusing manually. The camera can be set to enlarge the image as soon as the manual focus ring is moved. However, the AF system is also very capable and can pick out very small subjects

Click here to see the full resolution image

This shot was taken at ISO 6400 and although there's not much coloured speckling visible in the JPEG, there are signs of noise removal. When sized to A3 (16.5 x 11.7 inches) there's some softening and loss of detail in the tiles in the middle distance. A stippled texture becomes visible when the shot is examined at 100%.

Click here to see the full resolution image

The Impressive Art Creative Control produces some fun results, but it's nice that the Panasonic G6 enables you to have a 'clean' raw file as well.

Click here to see the full resolution image

The Panasonic G6's Multi-Metering system has done an excellent job with this scene, and the dynamic range accurately reflects what we saw.

Sensitivity and noise images

JPEG

Full ISO 160 image, see the cropped (100%) versions below.

ISO 160 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 25600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Raw

ISO 160 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 25600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Verdict

We liked the Panasonic G5 because as well as producing high quality images it has all the headline features that we want from a modern compact system camera: a good built-in electronic viewfinder, a vari-angle touchscreen, the ability to shoot raw and JPEG images when using the Creative Controls and a sensible control arrangement with some novel thinking.

While Panasonic hasn't done anything radical such as increasing the pixel count of the sensor, the Panasonic G6 has some good enhancements over the G5. The touchscreen, for example, is much more sensitive, which makes it faster and more inviting to use.

It seems strange that Panasonic has stepped back with the G6's Quick Menu, which unlike the G5's is not customisable.

We liked

Being able to compose images in either the viewfinder or on the LCD screen is something of a luxury with a compact system camera, and one that we really appreciate. The Panasonic G6's screen provides a nice clear view in all but the brightest light, but there are times when it just seems more natural to shoot with the camera held to your eye. It's also a more stable way of holding the camera, so the risk of camera shake is reduced.

Having a fully articulating screen is also a huge bonus, because it encourages you to shoot from more interesting angles. In these situations it's particularly helpful that the camera can be controlled via the touchscreen, even to the extent that the lens can be focused and the shutter fired with a touch of a finger on the screen.

We often complain about cameras only enabling us to shoot JPEG files when we want to use filter effects. Thankfully Panasonic enables raw files to be recorded at the same time when the Creative Control options are used. This means you can have a JPEG image with the effect applied and a clean raw file for normal processing.

We disliked

The 16 million pixel sensor in the Panasonic G6 has been around for a while now, and while we know that Panasonic likes to get value for money from its sensors, it would've been nice to have seen the pixel count rise to challenge the 24.3 million pixel offering of the Sony NEX-7.

It would also be nice if the Creative Control options could be used in the advanced exposure modes (aperture priority, shutter priority and manual) so there is control over the exposure.

Initial verdict

The Panasonic G6 feels like the most complete and well-rounded enthusiast-level Panasonic compact system camera to date. It may lack a few of the features and the rugged build of the Panasonic GH3, but it's also significantly smaller, making it a more attractive option to carry around with you.

It's also very capable, capturing high-quality images with plenty of sharp detail at the lower sensitivity settings. Image colour and exposure is also generally excellent.

Using the Wi-Fi connectivity isn't quite as slick an experience as we'd like, but the additional functionality is useful - and fun.

It is clear that the compact system camera is now stepping beyond the confines to which it has traditionally been assigned. The Panasonic G6's focusing system is fast and accurate in a range of conditions, and it is possible to shoot sport and action as well as take travel and landscape images.

Mainstream laptops are really starting to impress these days - not only are you generally paying a decent price, but you're also getting something truly excellent for the money.

The HP Pavilion Touchsmart Sleekbook 15 is just over 2cm thick, but don't be fooled into thinking it's an ultraportable; it's definitely a little too heavy for that at 2.1Kg - not the best for carrying around every day. Mind you, for moving from room to room at home it really wouldn't pose you a problem - it's hardly a brick.

It does, however, seem a trifle heavy when you consider you do not get an optical DVD/Blu-ray drive. As a result it does have something in common with the plethora of more expensive ultraportables on the market. If the lack of that specification disappoints you, then perhaps consider getting an external optical drive - internal ones are becoming something of a rarity and you may be unduly restricting your choice.

In addition to the slick, glossy design, there are two other key specifications to talk about. The first is the bright 15.6-inch 10-point touchscreen. We really liked the vibrancy of the display, while the touch was of good quality with plenty of responsiveness.

We really wish we'd had more laptops like this around the time that Windows 8 launched. It's only now that people are able to walk into stores and have a decent choice of Windows 8 touchscreen laptops.

The second key specification is the dual-core AMD A4-4355M 1.9GHz processor which not only boasts the usual CPU part, but it also features Radeon HD graphics cores on the same chip. It's an entry-level processor in terms of raw performance, though thanks to the graphics on board it can play a reasonable number of mainstream games.

But if that's of interest then be warned - it's not powerful enough for serious 3D gaming and therefore some users might to rule it out because of that. However, the processor is perfectly fine for most mainstream tasks. We wouldn't want to do any serious video editing on it, though.

Tons of features

In terms of other specifications, you won't be disappointed. There's a huge 8GB of memory, so you can handle plenty of concurrent tasks, while you also get an equally huge 1TB of storage - that's far more than you'll probably ever need and is plenty for music, videos, photos and your apps. And for entertainment, the powerful Altec Lansing speakers are enhanced with Dolby Advanced Audio to maximise the power of music and movie soundtracks.

We thought the keyboard was of terrific quality and you won't be disappointed when typing assignments or letters. The trackpad and mouse buttons were also decent although you will find yourself increasingly using the touchscreen. You might not think so, but you will; it just makes sense.

As for battery life, up to eight hours is promised. You won't get that. Instead, you'll almost certainly be in the range of five to seven hours depending on what you're doing. That's still pretty impressive for a laptop of this nature and while we very much expect you'll use it near a power source, anyway, it will perform admirably for a decent length of time on battery power.

Connectivity is plentiful, with an SD card reader, Ethernet connection for wired internet, Wi-Fi for wireless and a webcam. There's also a USB 2.0 port plus two USB 3.0-capable ports, as well as HDMI for connecting to an external display. All pretty much what you'd expect, although some may bemoan the lack of Bluetooth for tethering to a phone's internet connection.

One thing that did disappoint us was the amount of extra software on the device. It was just a little too much and we're disappointed that vendors still think littering the Start screen, desktop and desktop taskbar with apps is a good idea. We know it earns them money and we know they think it makes them look different to other PCs in the shop. But all it does is give the impression that somebody has already been on your PC when you take it out of the box. We found that most of this software was useless so we chose to uninstall most of it.

Verdict

The specification list we saw for this laptop said it wasn't a desktop replacement. But, the lack of DVD/Blu-ray drive aside, it's hard to see what this lacks that you would want from a machine you were replacing a desktop PC with. Yep, so the processor is a little slow, but that's about it.

The bottom line is that, if you buy this laptop, people will be amazed you didn't spend more on it. It looks good, has stacks of memory, runs well and has that all-important touchscreen. We think you'll be impressed with it, too.