What’s a phone maker to do if it wants to compete with Samsung’s excellent Galaxy Note II? If you’re Huawei, you go even bigger. The Ascend Mate has a 6.1-inch 720p display, which is about 0.6 inches larger than the screen on the Note II. It’s almost a little too big–a corner of it stuck out of my jeans pocket–which makes me hope Samsung doesn’t retaliate by going even larger with the Note III.
The Ascend Mate also has a 1.5 GHz quad-core processor, an 8-megapixel rear camera, a 1-megapixel front camera and a a huge 4050 mAh battery, which Huawei says can handle up to two days of ordinary usage on a single charge. Unfortunately, just like the Ascend D2, this phone lacks 4G LTE connectivity, so you may never see it on the U.S. market. It’s set to launch in China next month.