The Huawei SnapTo is a budget LTE smartphone with very few redeeming features. It's cheap, it has Android and LTE and you don't ever need a contract. Regrettably, that's about it.
The uninspired handset's 5-megapixel camera disappoints, and specs, while purposely entry-level, are also lower than those of other phones you can find in the same price range. Still, it will keep you connected. The SnapTo costs $180 unlocked, which converts to about £118, or AU$225.
Design and build
Josh Miller/CNET
Its 5-inch display is decent: off-axis viewing angles aren't especially wide, but colors don't shift when you tilt the screen about and are reproduced accurately. You can also change the display's color temperature, shifting from cool blues to warm yellows. I left it at the default settings, but this feature isn't all that common on entry-level smartphones.
That 720p resolution pales in comparison to higher-end devices, of course. But it suits the device well; the dimensions work out to a pixel density of about 294 pixels per inch (PPI), which makes for text that is nice and crisp. That pixel density also feels downright luxurious when compared to the Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime's 5-inch screen, with its 960-by-540-pixel resolution.
I'll admit I'm not especially smitten with the SnapTo's design, though there's nothing expressly wrong with it. It simply feels a bit safe, and boring -- the black-on-black phone is also available with a white backing, but if it came with a white face, or a broader arrangement of colors, I'd be a bit more intrigued. I suppose that's what cases are for.
The $150 Motorola Moto E I checked out in March was similarly plain but offered colorful, interchangeable bands so I could at least spruce things up a tad. And then there's the aforementioned Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime, which offers a nice, glossy off-white face accented in silver.
Software and features
Josh Miller/CNET
Huawei's OS touches are largely cosmetic: some apps have been re-skinned, and there are few generic widgets littering the homescreen. There are quite a few Huawei apps pre-installed, including a phone manager that will "optimize" your phone's performance by shutting down background apps. You'll see Huawei-branded support apps and generic productivity tools as well, like a flashlight, a calculator, and an FM radio app. These preloads aren't especially onerous, but the fact that I can't uninstall them or remove them from the homescreen annoys me immensely.
There's also no app drawer, which means every app is dumped onto the phone's homescreens, iPhone-style. I've always found this incredibly annoying, but if you're coming from an iOS device or aren't really a stickler keeping things tidy, then maybe you won't mind. You can of course arrange everything into folders, and create new home screens to drag apps to -- I've taken to dumping the bloat into a folder titled "Do Not Want" and leaving it at that.
Camera
Screenshot by Nate Ralph/CNET
Ultra Snapshot is a neat trick, but I would've preferred a dedicated camera shutter button. It also defaults to the camera's automatic mode -- I would've liked to set the mode to HDR mode or some other function, to make it a bit more useful. And trying to frame a shot and double-press the volume button, with the display off, while the phone is in landscape mode, is kind of hard to do on the fly. I suppose I could practice, but I missed so many shots it became far easier to just unlock the phone.
A quick-release shutter isn't going to be very useful if the camera isn't up to snuff, and the SnapTo's 5-megapixel shooter falls flat. Both the rear camera and the 2-megapixel camera up front churn out images that are full of noise, their details muddled. Video recording suffers from the same issues, and the SnapTo is also limited to 720p recording, further limiting its utility.
Nate Ralph/CNET
Huawei SnapTo: Low cost unlocked LTE handset
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