EE’s £150 all-glass Hawk phone offers super-fast 4G
A little more than a week ago we caught wind of a new own-brand smartphone by EE. Today, that device is official — it’s called the Hawk and will run you £150 on pay-as-you-go, or zilch with a two-year contract starting at £14.99 per month. That’s a tad more expensive than we were expecting (our little birdie pegged it closer to £100), but otherwise the Hawk contains few surprises. Up front is a 5-inch, 720p display running Android Nougat 7.1 (no word on Android Oreo), while a 1.5Gz, octa-core Mediatek 6750 processor and 2GB of RAM keep everything ticking over.
The device is essentially all-glass, save for the camera module and fingerprint scanner on the rear side. It looks nice enough (provided you don’t mind the EE logo) but doesn’t do much to set itself apart from the competition. And while we’re talking about cameras — it’s a 13-megapixel shooter on the back, paired with an 8-megpixel selfie snapper on the front. Given the phone’s price-tag, we expect they’ll fall somewhere in the poor to mediocre range. Finally, there’s a 2,500mAh battery inside, which EE says can last 10 hours on a single charge. Your mileage will vary, of course.
For the money, you could buy a similarly specced Moto E4, or splash a little extra on the impressive Moto G5 (it’s currently on sale at £159). The latter has a superior 1080p display, a Snapdragon 430 processor and a 2,800 mAh battery. So why bother with the Hawk? Well, the phone is also Cat-6 capable. That means it can take full advantage of EE’s LTE-Advanced network and reach download speeds of up to 300Mbps. It’s unlikely, of course, that you’ll ever experience such speeds — but still, if on-the-go streaming and downloads are important to you, it’s something to consider.
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