Eat It, Galaxy Note. Huwawei's New Phone Has the World's Largest Screen (Updated: Hands On)

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5973876/huaweis-ascend-mate-is-a-61+inch-mammoth-that-eats-phablets-for-breakfast

Oh man, here we go. Phablets are no longer no longer constrained to limits of being under half a foot. Huawei's new Ascend Mate is an unprecedented 6.1-inches. It's been around before, but now it's official, and has the largest screen of any smartphone in the world. To date anyway. Cower in fear beneath its all-encompassing shadow.

Aside from its ludicrous 6.1-inch, 361 ppi display, the Ascend Mate has a 4,050mAh battery and a 1.5GHz HiSilicon K3V3 quad-core chip, both of which it'll need to handle that wild screen that makes up 73 percent of the whole device. It runs Android Jellybean and is also functional even if you're wearing gloves, has built-in augmented reality navigation capability, and split-screen multi-tasking. In hopes of making calling more possible without holding the thing up to your face, the Mate has dual microphones, one on each end, to facilitate hands-free talking whenever possible.

Huawei's positioning the device to replace your laptop, eReader, phone, and tablet, billing it as an all-in-on machine. It'll be available in China starting late this month, and will roll out to "other markets" in March. Huawei is currently in talks with US carriers, and there's yet to be a price point for sale in the US. So far, markets seem to be agreeing that bigger is better, and if there's a limit, the Ascend Mate could be the one to find it.

Hands on:

It's impossible to understate how honkin' huge this thing is, as far as phones are concerned. It's pretty easily held in a moderately-size male hand, but its size just makes things look kind of weird. It's definitely a two-handed device; you can't hope to touch more than half the screen if you're just using the thumb of your holding hand. The "one-hand UI design" helps to make things a little more possible, but there's still a lot of real-estate you just can't hit. All in all, it feels nice, solid, but man, it's just so ludicrously huge to even think of as a phone.