Huawei stumbles

When I bought my Huawei Ideos X5 (U8800) Android phone in April 2011 nobody I showed it to had heard of the Chinese company. Indeed, they seemed reluctant to boost their profile, and did not show the Huawei name anywhere on the phone, labelling it as an Ideos X5 "with Google". Actually, my partner had unknowingly owned a Huawei phone for some time, but she did not realise this because her phone had a Virgin logo. Huawei want to become more prominent, but my recent experiences with the company show that they have some way to go before people think Huawei when they think of smartphones.

A recent article in The Guardian said that Huwei "... wants to place its products in the hands of millions of western consumers, and become the fourth largest manufacturer of smartphones by the end of this year". They went on to say that "Huawei's stated ambition is to become as big as Cisco or IBM, with annual revenues of $100bn in 10 years".

If Huawei want to be taken seriously then they need to provide acceptable customer service and support. In the Android world this is mostly determined by their ability to provide prompt bug-free firmware updates. So how have they gone?

Version	Android release	X5 release
2.2 - Froyo	May 2010	April 2011
2.3 - Gingerbread	December 2010	December 2011
4.0.4 - Ice Cream Sandwich	October 2011	April 2012 (unofficial)

There has been a delay of about a year after each Android release for Huawei to customise a version for the X5. That's a bit slow, but if they were bug free then it would be just about acceptable. Unfortunately they have problems releasing updated firmware without introducing new bugs. The XDA wiki, showing all the Huawei firmwares, shows the large number of releases, and Huawei's inconvenient propensity to remove older releases. They also tended to announce upcoming firmware release dates, but then not meet those dates.

I updated from the official 2.2 to the official 2.3, but found this added problems such as unresponsive widgets and the removal of the extremely impressive SRS WOW HD equaliser setting which made the built-in speaker sound great. On the plus side it added a fast boot option, which made the cold boot time go from very slow to very fast. Overall, though, it wasn't a great upgrade.

As you will have noted in the above table, there is now an Ice Cream Sandwich firmware for the X5. This is an unofficial Aurora firmware, which means that it's not provided by Huawei, and upgrading to it is a bit more involved than you'd expect for consumer hardware. However, the procedure is well documented, and the result is well worth it. I've found the upgrade to be relatively bug-free, and the internal speaker is now loud enough to be useful again. Although this firmware is still under constant development it is stable enough for everyday use. I'd recommend it to all users of this phone. Huawei have not announced an official update to Ice Cream Sandwich, so it's unlikely that one will ever be produced. (Update 31-May-2012: Apparently Huawei are not releasing any further updates for this phone.)

If I were purchasing an Android phone now I would probably go for a more highly-regarded company such as Samsung or Sony. Huawei do not yet offer the support I would consider mandatory, and they are not as widely used as the aforementioned brands, meaning that unofficial firmwares are less likely to appear. And unofficial firmwares are where one turns when the phone provided is slow or loses interest in an old model, which seems inevitable nowadays.