Huawei may not be renowned as Nokia, Samsung or Sony Ericsson in the mobile space but the Chinese company is trying hard to prove its mettle. They have launched some decent Androids in the market and with the launch of Cloud-based devices, the company is reaffirming its stance to grab some market share.
We had Huawei’s cloud-enabled Ideos X3 and this is what we think.
Design:
Ideos X3 boasts a pretty simple yet elegant design. Huawei went with a plastic body resulting in a lightweight and svelte form factor. The front is graced by a nice display, front-facing camera on the top, back, menu and search touch-sensitive keys and a physical home button. Disappointingly, the touch-sensitive keys are not backlit, making a bit difficult to use while in dark.
The back on other hand hosts the phone’s camera and a matte finished battery cover enabling superior grip on the 11.2mm thin device.
As for other placements, there’s a microUSB port at the bottom, a volume rocker on the right hand side and 3.5mm headphone jack and power button on the top.
Display:
Ideos X3 features a 3.2-inch LCD display supporting an HVGA resolution (320×480 pixels). Although the display quality is at par and acceptable at which the Ideos X3 is selling, Huawei has integrated a curved glass which is worth mentioning about. The curve may not be that substantial but the curviness of the display is pretty evident.
Performance and Software:
Huawei Ideos X3 is powered by a 600MHz processor and 256MB of RAM and runs a stock version of Android 2.3 OS. The only customizations Huawei did was to integrate their own keyboard, pre-loaded some apps and a theme launcher that allows customizing some home screen animations.
As for the performance, we would say that the amount of processor and RAM is adequate to run Android 2.3 without issues. Gingerbread works smoothly without showing any signs of lag. However, don’t hold high hopes for Huawei to upgrade the device to Ice Cream Sandwich since the hardware isn’t powerful enough to run the new Android OS.
Huawei has also pre-installed apps like Astute Planet, Bollywoodj as well as All Backup allowing users to backup their phone contents to SD card or cloud, including applications.
Cloud+:
This is one of the USP of the device and perhaps the only low-end phone apart from Sonic to offer cloud services. As evident from the screenshot, Huawei gives 16GB of free storage that will allow users to backup their photos, videos and other content to Huawei’s servers, sync contacts, wirelessly download apps to the device via Huawei’s Hispace app store and remotely find the phone, wipe it or lock it.
One thing to note is that the 16GB space is limited and there’s no way to expand it. Huawei confirmed to us that there aren’t any paid storage options for now but plans to do it in the future.
As for remote locking and wiping, users need to visit Huawei’s website, HiCloud, which will try and find the location of the device and then some options like locking it, ringing it or wiping it.
Huawei’s Message+ service is also a part of Cloud+. The app allows users to communicate with other Message+ users without needing to spend on SMS charges. Think of it as a Whatsapp, ChatON alternative but compatible only with Huawei devices.
Camera and Multimedia:
Huawei Ideos X3 comes with a 3.2MP camera and going by the price point the phone is positioned at, we would say the camera is at par on performance. There’s also a front-facing VGA camera to carry out video calls over 3G or Skype.
The phone in addition to a FM Radio, comes pre-installed with a music and a video player that supports variety of multimedia formats like MP3, AAC, MPEG-4 etc.
Battery Life:
The phone has a 1200mAh battery and with a light to moderate usage, you can easily make the phone last to a day or a day and a half.
Conclusion:
To put it simply, what you pay is what you get. Ideos X3 won’t break your bank but don’t expect a performance akin to a high-end Android. But if you this is your first tryst with the green bot, Ideos X3 won’t disappoint at all. In fact, it is optimized nicely keeping the hardware limitations in mind. Plus 16GB of free cloud storage for life isn’t bad either. Ideos X3 goes for around Rs. 10,000.
Rating: 
Pros: Cloud+, Optimized for performance
Cons: No backlight on touch-sensitive menu keys
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