Monthly Main Meeting Highlights

Welcome to the July 2013 Main Meeting

Tonight we opened with a new format and started the night with a talk run by Robert Israel and Alex Zaharov-Reutt on PC safety. You can find the details here.

That was followed by some consumer reports and Q & A.

After the break we met Luke Coleman the Public Affairs and Communications Manager for Huawei. China’s first private company.

Huawei started in 1987 by building PBX equipment in Shenzhen Province, China. Any of you who have used a broadband dongle have probably used a Huawei product. Most of the mobile phone companies use Huawei’s equipment rebadged as their own product.

Tonight Luke  showed us the Ascend range of mobile phones including the P7, the world’s thinnest mobile phone.

Luke started with the Ascend Mate

At 6.1 inches the Mate could be seen as Huawei’s answer to the Samsung Note

It runs a 1.5Ghz processor and comes with a high capacity battery.
The Mate comes with a suite of camera tools. These days it appears only photo enthusiast need a dedicated camera. The Mate can track a moving object, create panoramas and take a rapid set of shots. The Mate then has a whole range of photo enhancement tools to allow the user to edit the photo. Almost like having Photoshop on the phone.

All the phones Luke spoke about come with Gorilla Glass and Huawei’s “in-cell” touch screen technology.

Touch screens on mobile phones usually have three layers, the glass, the touch screen and the LCD display. Huawei’s touch screen technology integrates the LCD and the touch screen display to give a more responsive touch screen experience. The technology also allows for the creation of a thinner phone.

Another feature common to the Ascend was Emotion UI.

 Here, Huawei have developed a home page interface which can be highly customised to suit the user’s needs and desires.

With Emotion UI the user can create advanced profiles to suit different needs. In much the same way that phones have offered different ring settings for outdoor settings or meetings, Emotion UI will help the user create different home pages for varied occasions. You could perhaps create a home screen for work with appointments and contacts and one for the weekend with weather and sports results.

Huawei also offers floating windows which allow the user to have more than one operation taking place on the screen, for example, bring up a note pad which floats to one side of the contact you had open.

Huawei has also recognised that large screen phones can be difficult to use. To help, they developed touch screen placement technology which shifts windows like the keypad to the left or right of the screen to allow for one handed operation.

At the heart of all this is Huawei’s own processor, allowing their phones to deliver stunning speeds.

Details

Luke went on to have a look at the Huawei P 6.

It’s 6.18mm thin and has a 4.7” HD display.

It has both a rear camera of 8 megapixels and a front camera of 5 megapixels and 1080 pixel video.

 

It too is powered by the 1.5 Hz Huawei chip.

Here are the specs.

Huawei also make tablets and currently Telstra is offering the Mediapad free if you take out a contract with an Ascend P2.
Details of the Telstra Huawei Mediapad offer.

Here’s a link to a comparison of the Huawei Ascend range.

 

The Raffle

Huawei very generously donated an Ascend P2 for our raffle and Alex added the following goodies,

an iTech touch glove, which you can find at The Reject Shop and a LED reading light
 
Our winners

Dennis is on the phone,

 

while Malcolm is staying in touch and Paul will be lighting the way.

With Clare taking home the door prize.