When I had an email asking me if I would like to take part in the Huawei £100 Christmas challenge, I couldn't say yes fast enough! Based around the launch of Huawei's latest smartphone, the Ascend Y550, the challenge was to create an exciting day out with a budget of £100 and capture visual highlights with the phone. The Ascend Y550 is an Android-based smartphone, and comes packed with some great features for just £100. It comes with a large screen, two cameras (front and back), Bluetooth and is 4G-ready - really quite impressive considering that it does everything that my HTC One X can do! Seeing as I love taking pictures of just about anything, I got involved straight away. Now, I'm usually taking pictures for my blog on my Canon 400D, a DSLR camera, and am used to the quality that it gives me. On Saturday 20th, I left my camera at home - which I was going to be taking - and captured the best parts of my day solely using the Huawei Ascend Y550. How did I get on? Keep reading to find out...






My day out saw me heading up into the Yorkshire Dales with my family; every year, just before Christmas, we go up to a village called Hawes where they make Wensleydale Cheese. We stock up on all the delicious cheese for the festive period, and have a wander around with our two dogs, Holly and Zak. It's like a family tradition of sorts, and the perfect opportunity for me to trial out the camera on the Y550! We first stopped off at Ribblehead Viaduct, which carries the Settle-Carlisle railway and was built in 1874. I've been there several times throughout my childhood and love to stop and look at the impressive structure. What these pictures don't show you was how windy and rainy it was up there - we were all struggling to walk and thought we were going to be blasted away! I managed to grab a couple of pictures despite this, and even though my hands were frozen by the time I was done, I have to admit that I was quite impressed with the picture quality for a phone so cheap. None of the images were blurry, despite the extreme weather and not being able to hold it quite steady and they generally came out quite well.








After our brief stop at Ribblehead (It was literally a case of letting the dogs go to the toilet and back to the warmth of the car!), we went on to Hawes which was only a few minutes away. After struggling to find somewhere to park - it's always quite busy in the village in the lead up to Christmas - we decided to get ourselves some lunch first at a pub, and there was several to choose from! My brother and his girlfriend recommended The Old Board Inn, as they had eaten there a few weeks before when they came up with his girlfriend's family. It turned out to be an excellent choice, with an open log fire and plenty of places to sit. The menu selection was wide and varied, even for a lunchtime, with plenty of choice for my vegetarian parents. I ended up going for something vegetarian myself; the Broccoli, Stilton and Mushroom Pasta that came with chips and a salad. Everyone else went for the soup of the day, which was Butternut Squash and a sandwich each, with the exception of my brother who went for the Lemon, Thyme and Rocket Risotto. Of course, we had to have a pint of Black Sheep Ale each to wash it all down with - it's a very local beer, after all! The camera on the Y500 did struggle a bit indoors; as you can see, it overexposed on the glasses of beer and there is some noticeable noise on the image of my food (which was absolutely delicious by the way!), but it performed well on the close-up of the menu, with all the text remaining in focus and it even managed to take a well-exposed picture of the fire.






Feeling very full after our lunch, we went to go walk it off around the village of Hawes and give our dogs the chance to stretch their legs. I decided to give my dog Zak his Christmas present early, which was the stripey hat you can see in the picture above - doesn't he look adorable? He gets cold very easily, so it made sense for him to road test his hat in the cold Yorkshire Dales for the first time. Zak doesn't like to stay still for any amount of time, so taking a picture of him is always a challenge - but after a couple of blurry shots I managed to grab one that I don't think has turned out badly at all. Cameras always tend to overexpose his face as it is almost completely white, which the Y550 has done here, but only slightly. We walked all the way down to the end of the village, where there is a stunning and very noisy waterfall, then walked all the way back up via a few trinket shops. There's a shop that I always stop in called Elijah's, that's mainly a grocery store but sells an impressive selection of local beers and food. Seeing as Martin was unable to come with us this year, I picked up a beer gift pack for him, which was two bottles of beer with a corresponding pint glass, some Kendal mint cake and some other bits and pieces for him to enjoy.






The next stop was the star of the show... the Wensleydale Creamery! We never bother doing the creamery tour (we've done it once, and once you have there's no need to do it again as it never changes!), instead we just head straight for the visitor centre and spend some serious money in the gift and cheese shop. The gift shop has expanded over the years; it used to be quite small, with only a handful of related products as well as the cheese, but in 2010 it tripled in size to accommodate for the growing number of visitors. It's one of the largest tourist attractions in Yorkshire, and it's not hard to see why! The gift shop had practically everything you can think of - from Wallace and Gromit merchandise, to boxes of traditional fudge all the way to tea towels celebrating the Tour de Yorkshire, there was something for everyone! I ended up picking up a few items, before heading into the dedicated cheese shop. It's set up as a 'U' shape, so you enter through one door and leave via another, with the chance to taste all of the cheese they sell along the way - well, it would've been rude not to, wouldn't it?!






After trying everything once, or twice, or even three times - got to test for quality control purposes, of course - we filled up our basket to the brim with enough cheese to feed an army. Of course, a giant truckle of the original Wensleydale cheese had to go in, as well as several smaller truckles of our favourites, including cranberry, smoked and apricot. They had a few new additions for this year; Mince Pie, which was too rich for all of us, Winter Warmer (cranberry and festive spices), which was nice enough but nothing special, and Salted Caramel, which was so weird that I had to pick up a chunk of just so Martin could try it! It was nice, but obviously quite sweet, and I'm not sure that it works. I also picked up my favourite Abbot's Gold, which isn't Wensleydale at all and is actually a cheddar (still made on the premises mind you), and some Wensleydale and Ginger, my personal favourite. I like to have mango chutney with my Wensleydale cheese, which I know is strange, so when I saw that they were selling some honey to go with cheeses this year I added one to the basket to try instead of the chutney. Now, the lighting was not the best inside the visitor centre, with it being very bright inside the cheese section, but the camera coped fine. The colours are reasonably accurate, and whilst again it overexposed on parts, it's only what I expected and I found it quite easy to take a picture of myself holding the cheese!







Last but not least, was a stop off at the Black Sheep Brewery in Masham, about half an hour away from Hawes. We weren't planning on going, but we all wanted to have a look round and enjoy a drink so off we went! At this point it was starting to get dark, so I was able to test how the Y550's camera performed in low light. Again, we didn't bother with the tour and went straight to the gift shop. We all ended up picking up some of their new design pint glasses, after being told we could buy them there by the lady in the pub in Hawes. I think that we cleared out most of the shelf by the time we were all done! Of course, I had to pick up a few of their beers too; the Imperial Russian Stout, Velo (their beer for the Tour de Yorkshire), and their new Christmas beer Blitzen, which I had also picked up in Elijah's in Hawes without realising it was a Black Sheep! Oh well. We then had a drink in the cafe/bar; I went for a "Ewe-phoria" hot chocolate, complete with whipped cream, marshmallows and a Flake, which was the perfect way to warm me up after a day outside in the cold! There was also some Riggwelter beer to be had, which I had a sip of, and it definitely tastes better on draught than it does in the bottle! The Y550 coped well in the low light, both indoors and outdoors - much better than I expected, as a matter of fact. Whilst I was taking the pictures, the phone was sharpening the images for me after each one, which did seem to make a bit of difference; but in a couple of pictures I think it did it too much, which you can tell on the image below.



So, how did I find the Huawei Ascend Y550, overall? The camera surprised me in terms of quality, and I think at £100 for the device you would be hard pushed to find something much better. The main problems that I found were that it overexposed on areas of high contrast, and was noisy in low light, but this is to be expected of any camera and the resulting images are still very much usable. I also found that it took a little while to focus and take the picture, but once it had the images were clear nearly every time. My only major gripe with the phone is that there are many apps installed on there that you can't get rid of, and they take up a lot of space on the 4GB internal storage. I had to install a 1GB microSD card into the phone, which whilst easily done ended up being necessary in order for me to complete my challenge. That being said, this phone would be suitable for someone who is just getting into smartphones, and as such are probably not putting an amazing camera and therefore taking lots of pictures at the top of their priority list. I found the actions of the phone to be smooth, and it didn't lag at all when switching between apps. Whilst the back of the phone is made out of plastic and therefore it feels a bit cheap, the phone as a whole feels well-built, and I would be sure that the screen wouldn't smash when dropped  - unlike other certain smartphones that cost four times as much! For £100, I am surprised at just how much you can do with this phone and how well it performs all round. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the Ascend Y550 to anyone who wants an Android smartphone, that does everything that the "big boys" can do yet doesn't want to spend an astronomical amount of money.