The smartphone world now has the growing trend of producing handsets with ever increasing screen sizes, which really all begun with the launch of the original Samsung Galaxy Note back in 2011. Now many handset manufacturers have jumped on the phablet bandwagon and today we are looking at a comparison between the Huawei Ascend Mate vs. Sony Xperia Z Ultra.

The Huawei Ascend Mate has been around for a while now while the Xperia Z Ultra has only recently been announced, and marks Sony’s first venture into supersized smartphones. The Sony measures in at 6.44-inches that compares to the Ascend Mate at 6.1-inch.

While both handsets have a rather angular feel to them with the Huawei having a nice design and build quality, and the front facia uses a narrow bezel without any physical buttons on the front. The outside edge seems to be aluminium where you will find the power and volume controls that feel nice in use.

At the bottom of the device is the microUSB charging port while the back panel is slightly curved using a matte rubber finish that feels good when held. The smartphone isn’t lightweight though at 198grams and the 6.1-inch display at a resolution of 1280 x 720 and 241ppi is pretty good in use.

It has good colour reproduction with pretty good sharpness and contrast and returns decent results when playing games or watching video content. The quad core 1.5GHz processor and 2GB of RAM provides results that you would expect on most tasks but it can prove a little sluggish when pushing it hard.

You get only 16GB of built in storage but this can be expanded by another 32GB via microSD card, and the 4,050 mAh battery should provide all the juice you will ever need. The 8-megapixel rear camera offers reasonable results with a crisp image, but it could be better.

The Sony device is based on the Xperia Z so obviously has a good build quality with the outside edge made with polycarbonate that feels good in the hand. The Full HD display returns some impressive results with excellent brightness and colour reproduction from the Triluminos technology. Storage wise the device is similar to the Huawei except it can handle microSD cards up to 64GB, and while the 3,050 mAh battery is smaller it still provides good battery life.

Processing power is better thanks to the 2.2GHz Snapdragon processor and 2GB of RAM easily handling anything that you can throw at it. In conclusion it was found that the user experience of both handsets are similar, but the Huawei Ascend Mate only offers an average performance that also has some lag while the Sony has no such problems easily taking care of anything that is asked of it.

The Android skins on the two devices varies greatly with the Huawei’s overlay looks like stock Android, but the company has messed around with the OS functionality too much and there isn’t even an app drawer, and the Sony just has more to offer than the Ascend Mate but could be too large for some users.

Source: Know Your Mobile.