Huawei Activa 4G (MetroPCS)

The Huawei Activa 4G ($149) for MetroPCS is Huawei's first 4G LTE-capable smartphone. While 4G LTE isn't as fast on MetroPCS as it is on AT&T or Verizon, you still get plenty of speed for your buck, which is sweetened by the carrier's inexpensive monthly plans. Unfortunately, that alone isn't enough to save this phone. The Huawei Activa is buggy, built with low-end parts, and has a poor camera. You're better off paying an extra $100 for a far more capable LTE device.

Design, Call Quality, and Data Plans
The Huawei Activa measures 4.8 by 2.4 by .4 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.9 ounces. Despite the low depth figure on paper, the Activa looks and feels especially thick, like it's two phones that have been pressed into one. The back is made of black plastic with a light pattern design, while a dark silver band surrounds the face of the phone. It's a decent size to hold and use, but it has a bit of a cheap, chintzy feel.

The 3.5-inch, 320-by-480-pixel capacitive touch LCD is bright enough, but the low resolution often makes text appear jagged. The on-screen keyboard is small and somewhat difficult to type on. Below the display is a mammoth chin, nearly an inch of space filled only by four capacitive touch function buttons. It feels like a waste of space, and it doesn't look particularly good, either.

The Activa works on MetroPCS's LTE network where it can find it, and on the much slower 2G CDMA network where it can't. The phone also uses 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and connected to my WPA2-encrypted Wi-Fi network without a problem.

Reception is weak, and call quality isn't much better. Voices sound clear but extremely thin in the phone's earpiece. Calls made with the phone are also clear, but background noise cancellation is practically nonexistent. The speakerphone is far too quiet to use outside, though it worked well indoors. Calls sounded fine through a?Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars), and voice dialing worked well over Bluetooth without training. Battery life was a bit short at 5 hours, 16 minutes of talk time.

4G LTE on MetroPCS is very different than it is on AT&T and Verizon. As we discovered in our?Fastest Mobile Networks?testing, rather than offering spectacular speeds, MetroPCS is going for decent speeds at very low prices. The carrier's average 4G speeds are more like a very good 3G network. This Activa pulled in average download speeds of 4.2Mbps and uploads of 2.3Mbps, which is consistent with the other LTE phones we've tested.

MetroPCS recently changed up its 4G LTE plans, but they still remain very affordable. For $70 per month you can get unlimited talk, text, and data, along with unlimited music from Rhapsody and video on demand from MetroStudio. $60 gets you unlimited talk and text, 5GB of 4G data, and unlimited music through Rhapsody. $50 is good for unlimited talk and text, along with 2.5GB of 4G data, and $40 gets you 250MB of 4G data. You should probably skip the $40 plan, but the $50 provides plenty of high-speed data for most people.

Apps, Multimedia, Camera and Conclusions
The Activa runs Android 2.3.6 (Gingerbread). There's no word on an update to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), but it probably isn't happening.?As far as the OS is concerned, this is basically stock Android, with almost no interference from Huawei. There are five customizable home screens you can swipe between, which come preloaded with some standard apps and widgets. There's a good amount of bloatware installed, but luckily you can delete most of it. The phone also comes preloaded with a copy of Kung Fu Panda 2, though it eats up lots of valuable space on your (Kung Fu Panda-branded) microSD card.

The Activa is powered by an 800MHz?Qualcomm MSM7627T?processor. Performance was slow across the board, and the phone turned in benchmark scores that were actually closer to phones powered by a 600MHz processor. The Activa should be compatible with most of the 400,000+ apps in the Google Play store, though graphics-intensive games may not run smoothly. I also encountered a lot of bugs. Sometimes apps wouldn't install after downloading them from Google Play. Other times, while listening to music, songs would randomly stop or only play for the first few seconds. There were error messages that a particular type of file couldn't be played, only for it to work a few tries later. And the notifications bar at the top of the screen is frustratingly unresponsive, often requiring several swipes to drag down.

Multimedia support is mediocre. There's 151MB of free internal storage, along with a preloaded 4GB microSD card; my 32 and 64GB SandDisk cards worked fine as well. The phone was able to play AAC, MP3, OGG, and WMA music files, but not FLAC or WMA. Aside from the bugs I mentioned above, music sounded fine over both wired 3.5mm headphones as well as?Altec Lansing BackBeat?Bluetooth headphones ($99.99, 3.5 stars). For video, the Activa was only able to play H.264 and MPEG4 test files, at resolutions up to 800-by-480. Audio over Bluetooth was slightly out of sync.

The Activa's 5-megapixel camera has an LED flash but lacks autofocus. Shutter delay is too long, at 1.6 seconds. Photos snapped have average color, but sorely lack fine detail. The video camera is worse. Videos max out at a tiny, blurry 352-by-288-pixel resolution, and play back at an unusable 12 frames per second indoors, and a slightly better 20 frames per second outside. There's also a 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video chats.

The Huawei Activa 4G will hook you into MetroPCS' 4G LTE network for less than $150, but once you get there, you're stuck. Between the bugs, low-end specs, poor camera and middling call quality, you'd be much better off spending an extra $100 on the LG Connect 4G?($249, 4 stars). You'll get a larger, brighter, much more beautiful display, along with a fast 1.2GHz dual-core processor and a better camera. That's your best bet as far as 4G devices are concerned, as the Samsung Galaxy Attain 4G?($299, 3.5 stars) and LG Esteem?($379, 4 stars) are both significantly more costly, and neither are as fast as the Connect 4G. If you're more interested in playing games and making calls than in fast data speeds, the LG Optimus M+?($149, 3.5 stars) is a good starter phone, though it runs on a much slower 2G network.

Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 5 hours 16 minutes

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