The Huawei P1's 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display is another mixed bag, but it's mostly pretty good: the screen is bright, extremely colorful, has excellent viewing angles, and those deep, deep blacks that come from using organic pixels rather than a backlight to selectively illuminate the screen. Some of my colleagues might tell you that colors look oversaturated, and they probably do, but I like the effect. The problem that we almost all agree on, yet again, is that Huawei's using a display with a PenTile matrix. The technical explanation has to do with using a star-like arrangement of sub-pixels to make up the dots on screen rather than neat rows from top to bottom, and with two green sub-pixels for every red and blue. The actual result is that images, icons and text appear to have jagged edges, and whites can look green up close. The effect diminishes a bit the higher your screen resolution, but at 960 x 540 and 4.3-inches, it's quite noticeable if you have an eye for such things. It's a pretty decent screen, really, but there are far better ones, including Samsung's Super AMOLED Plus displays, and the 1280 x 720 resolution screens that are gradually getting integrated into top-tier smartphones these days.

One tentatively welcome surprise, though, is just how much audio the Ascend P1's speaker can pump out. Huawei has licensed Dolby Mobile audio software for the Ascend P1, and while I've always been a bit skeptical about the value of such software, this particular phone shows my concerns were not wholly accurate. Without Dolby processing turned off, the phone sounds even poorer and quieter than most (almost suspiciously so) but with it on, the Ascend P1 produces something of a Jawbone Jambox effect: it's hard to believe there's that this much sound can come from that tiny speaker.

Before you run out and buy one based on the strength of the audio, though, know that Dolby Mobile only seems to work in Huawei's music app. When listening to the exact same tunes in Google Music or playing from a Flash video in the browser, it sounded notably worse than my Droid 4, which doesn't have such a great speaker itself.