Sorry i haven't been around,guys. I'll try to put up some pictures tomorrow.
Regarding battery life, haven't got the time to benchmark it properly but it seems kinda low so far. Tried unsuccessfully to root it with SuperOneClick and z4root. Seems to be either a Win7/driver issue (it says something about being the wrong platform during installation). If anyone could point me in the right direction i'd be grateful. Reason i need root is to use a CPU governor because 'cell standby' and 'idle state' (?) seems to be drawing more than their fair share of power. i intend to put it on 'on demand' scaling or something similar.
I found something quirky. With the USB cable plugged in the touchscreen starting acting like some invisible guy was randomly going through my phone !! This happened a couple of times. (I tried to reproduce the effect at the time of posting but no luck )
Whenever this happened the touchscreen became unusable till i pulled the cable out after which it works normally. I still don't know if this is due to some rogue app i installed or a hardware/firmware defect. This is the only oddity i've encountered thus far.
You might want to want to stay away from this phone if the following are important to you.
a) excellent battery backup
b) excellent picture and video quality
c) Need louder than average speakers
d) .... ( will add more when i can think of something)
Now having said that, if your're ok with average battery life (i'm pretty sure it will get better ) and average pic/video quality, this is a very decent buy. If you can wait for a few months more, you can probably get it a few thousand bucks cheaper and with 2.3 pre-installed. The guys at the outlet said " upgradable to 2.3"
Regarding UI, i don't know if this one has custom UI ( looks plain to me). I'm using Go Launcher with Live wallpapers. Cincinnati Bell is launching this as
Huawei Ascend X | Cincinnati Bell Wireless Cell Phones Cincinnati with a buy-1-get-1 offer on a 2 yrs contract or $250 outright in the States .We can hope for custom ROMs to arrive in a few months if this becomes the next Blade.
Another thing i discovered was this phone has 5 sensors only two of which are properly named in the system info. The Philippines/Thailand version has " Bosch accelerometer / Yamaha Magnetic Sensor / Yamaha Orientation Sensor / Liteon Ambient Light Sensor / Liteon Proximity Sensor". Need root before i can take screenshots.