Huawei P6

Time to upgrade my personal contract and looked into something decent vs. price. Seems to be no stock anywhere… MTN.
 
Helped my mum set tp bbm and whatsapp on the phone yesterday. Pretty decent phone and comes with a cover.
 
Why not just upgrade through MTN Direct? If they have stock delivery is usually very fast
 
The only complaint I have so far with my P6 is that the GPS seems to be a little bit dodgy. It can take very long to aquire satelites and is prone to "drop" the gps signal while you drive and then navigations stops untill it picks it up again. The last scenario not a trainsmash as it re-establishes signal rather quickly but pretty sure it is not normal. My motorola never used to do that. I have seen some other people complaining about the same thing and they hope it gets sorted with a ffmware update.

Oh ... and Radio does not have RDS ... but that is not the end of the world.
 
Ockie said:
The only complaint I have so far with my P6 is that the GPS seems to be a little bit dodgy. It can take very long to aquire satelites and is prone to "drop" the gps signal while you drive and then navigations stops untill it picks it up again. The last scenario not a trainsmash as it re-establishes signal rather quickly but pretty sure it is not normal. My motorola never used to do that. I have seen some other people complaining about the same thing and they hope it gets sorted with a ffmware update.

Oh ... and Radio does not have RDS ... but that is not the end of the world.
Click to expand...

At least it has radio :P My Galaxy S4 doesnt!
 
MTN main branch in Bloem managed to get me one! A bargain for R199 a month. Finished the deal yesterday and got my micro sim from Telkom Mobile today and using it now!
 
My firmware is B107 when I tried to do a OTA update it says I have the latest Firmware. On Huawei's site there's a B111 firmware for download. Can I only get this update through download ? And then how do I install it?
 
Never mind I downloaded the V100R001C00B111 package, all 961.78 MB of it. There is a installation PDF inside the zip. There were reports that the B111 firmware had a speed improvement over B107 but that is not my experience. The P6 is capable of Preforming a lot of throttling to conserve battery life. Its CPU's can run from 200MHz to 1500Mhz and it can reduce the number of active cores in the GPU and CPU. So if you going to run benchmarks make sure your battery manager is turned to normal else results can be inaccurate. I think this may have lead to the misconception. My benchmark results with B111 were: AnTuTu around 15000 and Quadrant 5000 plus. For me the plus points of the P6 are:
A beautiful crispy clear display protected by Gorilla glass. The music player's sound output into the supplied headset is excellent. The Dolby sound enhancement gives a crispy clear quality to even 70 and 80's rock music.
The Emotion 1.6 UI is pleasing on the eye.
The down side is:
Its battery life is not good and its difficult to get it to last for a day.
The UI does not have an icon tray and allows only one instance of a App icon on the system, it must be in a folder or on a home screen. Dragging an icon to the garbage bin would uninstall the App, except if it is part of the package then it cannot be uninstalled. I made a folder to keep these unwanted icons in. If the preinstalled app does not need to run it can be disabled and then its icon would disappear.
It does allow you to save part of a App to the SD card but not by default. It does not have a option to move all media files to SD and move the download folder to SD. These are all attributes of stock Android 4.2.2.

At this stage I think Stock Android firmware for the P6 would be an improvement.
 
Last edited:
Ockie said:
The only complaint I have so far with my P6 is that the GPS seems to be a little bit dodgy. It can take very long to aquire satelites and is prone to "drop" the gps signal while you drive and then navigations stops untill it picks it up again. The last scenario not a trainsmash as it re-establishes signal rather quickly but pretty sure it is not normal. My motorola never used to do that. I have seen some other people complaining about the same thing and they hope it gets sorted with a ffmware update.

Oh ... and Radio does not have RDS ... but that is not the end of the world.
Click to expand...

New firmware B118 is supposed to fix this

http://huaweinews.com/2013/10/ascend-p6-b118-firmware-leaked/
 
I did not find the P6 slower than other phones to acquire GPS satellites they all seem to take longer the first time you use the device and then become faster as they gather info from the satellites but there are times that there are only a few satellites in sight. I did see the glitch Ockie mentioned: every now and then it would “reset” and lose all satellites and start over again. What I did find interesting while playing with GPS Test is the fact that it uses American GPS satellites and Russian GLONASS satellites and this makes it more accurate when it gathers more than 10 satellites. With a mix of 12 satellites it was within 1 meter. You usually need special GPS device with access to additional GPS satellites to obtain that kind of accuracy. It does have a less sensitive GPS receiver and battles to receive indoors but still does better than my Garmin. The B118 firmware is only available to the Chinese market (Huawei’s main market) but I hope it would be available to the rest of the world soon.
 
B118 is an international release( Africa). B117 is a Chinese release. B118 Includes Google apps.
 
Just updated the missus P6 to B118. GPS lock is near instantaneous, on par with my Nexus 4
 
Excellent! I Have downloaded B118 At work, should be finnish by tonight, if I dont hear anything bad by next week I give it a try.
 
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