EE Hawk

The EE Hawk is in many ways a quite basic Android phone. It's affordable on a "pay as you go" deal, and doesn't add much to the price of a cheap contract.

You wouldn't guess it's so cheap from a quick feel though, as a glass back makes the EE Hawk seem a more expensive phone than it is. It's a slicker looker than the Moto G5.

It also has a "4G+" modem, letting it theoretically make use of mobile data speeds of up to 300Mbps on EE's network.

However, low screen resolution and slow app loads ensure its build and appearance are the strongest elements.

EE Hawk price and availability

• £149.99 on Pay As You Go
• Only on EE

The EE Hawk costs £149.99 on Pay As You Go, subject to a £10 top-up that gets you 1GB of data and 250 minutes, lasting 30 days.

It's also available for "free" on contracts of £12.99 a month and higher. That bargain basement contract offers 300MB of data and 300 minutes of calls, so isn't for high-end users. A quick reminder: at the time of writing you'll pay £99.99 on top of £47.99 a month for a 1GB of data deal for an iPhone 8 from EE.

If you're a data guzzler, the £18.99 EE Hawk plan offers 2GB of data and a generous 1000 minutes.

Key features

• Cat 6 LTE (up to 300Mbps)
• Glass back
• Octa-core CPU

The EE Hawk does a great job of impressing with its surface features. Most obvious of the lot, it has a glass back and front, and has the dense feel of a more expensive phone.

Its back also glints in the sun, thanks to a layered finish. The EE Hawk is no Honor 9 in terms of eye-catching design, but it's not plain either.

There are also modern touches like a rear fingerprint scanner and a USB-C charge socket. However, the real aim of the EE Hawk other than looking good is to provide solid entry-level specs at a good price.

These include an octa-core CPU, 16GB of storage and a 13MP rear camera. And the one EE is proudest of is Cat 6 LTE, which you may see called 4G+.

This makes download speeds of 300Mbps possible, although most of EE's contracts only allow for speeds of up to 60Mbps. The Moto G5 offers similar real-world 4G speeds too, so don't get too excited.

In pure box-ticking terms the EE Hawk has everything we're after in an entry-level phone. And it's not a bad choice if you want to pair-up with EE.

However, fresh app loads can be a little slow and the camera is not as useful, and doesn't take as good photos, as the Moto G5.

Design

• Smart Gorilla Glass design
• Slim and pocketable
• Looks similar to an iPhone 8

The EE Hawk looks a lot like a black iPhone 8 without a Touch ID pad from the front. Its curves have that Apple flavour and thanks to the 5-inch screen the phone is a manageable size.

A glass back separates the Hawk from the budget competition, which tend to - at best - use some aluminium. The back and front are tough Gorilla Glass, the sides very solid plastic you could easily mistake for aluminium if you don't look too closely. Those sides don't have the cool feel of metal, of course.

The EE Hawk also lacks an ultra-slim screen surround, but we don't expect one at this level.

At £150 this phone looks and feels great, among the very best in this class. The finish isn't entirely simple either. Behind the glass on the back there’s a layer that catches the light, revealing it to be very dark blue rather than the black it appears in some photos.

If light catches it at the right angle, you'll see a laser-like beam splaying out from the centre. It's subtle, and we needed to use a spotlight to bring it out more in our photos. But it is there, giving the EE Hawk another hit of flair.

The fingerprint scanner is more important, if anything. It sits on the back and is indented, making finding it with your finger very easy. You just put your finger here and the Hawk does the rest.

It seems a little picky if you don't land your fingerprint dead on the circle, but place it squarely and the scanner works very well.

It'll wake your phone up from standby in around a second. It's not the fastest around, but if you're looking at buying the EE Hawk it seems unlikely you'll have been spoilt by many £500+ phones with lightning fast fingerprint scanners.

Screen

• Not the sharpest, but looks good after tweaks
• 720p LCD display
• Customisable via MiraVision

The EE Hawk has a sensible, non-flashy 5-inch screen. It's small, but not too small to put you off games or mobile Netflix, and it uses a standard IPS LCD display.

Resolution is the obvious shortfall. The Moto G5 has a 1080p screen, the Hawk just a 720p one. As a result, text looks softer, and you can see pixellation if you look too close.

However, even after years of having 1080p budget phones we're still surprisingly happy with how the Hawk's screen looks. It doesn't appear blocky, just a little softer than a higher-end 1080p phone.

Of course, you can get one of these for around the same price, so let's not be too nice to EE.

Colours look slightly cold fresh out of the box and at extreme angles the white balance goes a bit blue or yellow. However, there's a MiraVision feature that lets you tweak the saturation, and other elements like temperature.

By making the colour temperature much warmer with MiraVision, you can make the EE Hawk's display look rather nice.

Battery life

• 2,500mAh battery
• Reasonable life

The EE Hawk has a 2,500mAh battery. That's smaller than the 2,800mAh of the Moto G5, but let's not forget this phone has a lower-resolution 720p screen, which should in theory use less power.

It doesn't do too badly either. A 90-minute video played at maximum brightness takes 17% off the battery. This actually beats the Moto G5, which loses 22% in the same test: the lower-res screen does make a difference.

We've found moderate general use will see the Hawk last a full day, if not much more. Like most budget phones, the aim is to deliver good stamina, not class-leading battery life.

20 minutes of Real Racing 3 takes 8% off the battery, suggesting the Hawk will last around 4 hours 10 minutes of high-end gaming. Again, it's not bad but not amazing either.

The phone uses a USB-C cable to charge like most new mobiles, although doesn’t have ultra-fast charging.

Camera

• Limited software
• Slow HDR
• Fair photo quality in daylight

The EE Hawk has a conventional camera setup for a phone in its class. There's a 13MP camera on the back with a dual-LED flash and an 8MP camera on the front.

Its hardware sounds good enough, even though it uses Samsung image sensors rather than the Sony kind used by most of the best budget performers. However, there's nothing special going on in the software, at all.

The EE Hawk's camera app can be slow to load up, which is annoying if you're trying to capture a fleeting moment. And other aspects we consider near-essential are missing from the app.

There's no auto HDR mode for example. HDR, which reveals more detail in the darkest and lightest parts of an image, is either on or off, and has to be switched over manually. You won't want to use HDR too often either as it's extremely slow to shoot, like a phone of several years ago.

Focusing can be slow too, although the EE Hawk does manage to avoid the most consistently annoying kind of camera performance issue: shutter lag. There's just a fractional delay between hitting the shutter and capture occurring with the standard mode.

So while there are numerous ways to improve the Hawk's camera experience, it's still reasonably enjoyable to use if you stick to regular shooting (rather than HDR).

Image quality is decent in good lighting, with generally good exposure metering and reasonable sharpness across the frame with easy-to-capture day-lit scenes. However, there are signs the Hawk uses an entry-level sensor that can't keep up with, for example, a phone with a better 12MP sensor and smarter processing.

Fine texture detail can appear dithered, indistinct or noisy. And while the Hawk is surprisingly adept at dealing with tricky lighting, with a bright source in shot, it doesn't have the dynamic range to make these images really pop.

Again, it could do with smarter, more usable HDR processing. Like other phones that use Samsung's budget 13MP sensors, you'll probably be happy, but not blown away by this camera.

As with most other budget 13MP phones, photos start to look significantly worse with indoors or low light. Contrast and punch drains away, and more noise creeps in fairly quickly. The EE Hawk is a case of just-good-enough hardware matched with software and processing that doesn’t wring the best out of it.

That doesn't mean you can't eke some great shots out of the EE Hawk, just that your hit rate isn't going to be all that high.

For video, you can shoot at 1080p and electronic image stabilisation crops into the frame to reduce motion judder.

Around the front the EE Hawk has an 8MP camera. It can carve out more detail than a very basic selfie camera, but images tend to look a little soft in parts, lacking the life of a higher-quality 8MP sensor. And colours look glum if you don't have a decent amount of light with which to work.

Camera samples

Interface and reliability

• Android Nougat with the light Launcher3 UI
• Minimal bloat
• Fair performance

The EE Hawk runs Android Nougat. And while you might assume it's vanilla Android from a quick glance, it actually isn't. This is Launcher3, a light custom interface.

It's simple, and feels a lot like a slightly older version of vanilla Android. There' still an apps menu button, unlike the gesture-based Google Pixel 2, but the apps menu scrolls vertically as usual and the icon style is classic Android.

The EE Hawk misses out on a few (semi) important features of Android 7, though. For example, in other phones with this version of Android you can long-press icons to bring up shortcuts that take you right to specific parts of the app. You don't get those here.

There are collapsible notifications, though, and minimal bloat. An EE app that lets you check and top-up your account is pre-installed, as is Lookout security. 

Despite there seemingly not being much bloat though you only actually get around 7-8GB out of the 16GB on board to install your own apps.

Initially we found apps a little slow to load, but after the necessary data is cached for your favourite apps the EE Hawk starts feeling like a reasonably slick Android phone.

There's no annoying wait for the phone to catch up with you as you type an address into, say, the Chrome browser, or any strange pauses as you move between the apps menu and the home screen.

However, this is a phone that needs to bed in a little. For the first six hours or so there were a few concerning pauses. 

In the following days the EE Hawk seemed to get up to speed, likely due to optimisation of resources cached in the phone's RAM.

Movies, music and gaming

• Reasonable bottom-firing speaker
• 16GB of storage
• Fine for high-end gaming

The phone also has zero problem with high-end games. While its core hardware is entry-level, the relatively low 720p screen resolution puts much less strain on the graphics processor.

Titles like Asphalt 8 and Gear.Club run well, with generally high frame rates and only the occasional stutter or noticeable frame rate drop.

There's a single speaker on the bottom edge, so you don't get stereo sound. This is a generally clean and clear-sounding speaker with fair volume. However, it doesn't have the bulk or power of the best.

For movie watching, you'll want to use some headphones. There are also no dedicated video apps beyond the basic system-level player and Google Play Movies, which lets you rent titles from Google's own library.

Media hoarders, rather than streamers, will want to buy a microSD card, as the 16GB of internal storage only leaves room for a few films.

Performance and benchmarks

• Entry-level octa-core CPU
• 2GB of RAM
• Performance is about right for the price

The EE Hawk has a MediaTek MT6750 chipset. This is a low-end chipset, but not a true bottom-grade one. It has eight cores, all of the Corex-A53 type. Four are clocked at 1GHz for everyday use, and four are at up to 1.5GHz. They kick in when more power is required.

These are paired with a dual-core Mali-T860 graphics chipset. This same graphics processor has caused some significant performance issues in 1080p phones, but it seems easily powerful enough to keep a 720p phone happy.

In Geekbench 4 the EE Hawk scores 2,560 points. This places it much closer to something like the Snapdragon 430 of the Moto G5 than the Snapdragon 625 of the Moto G5 Plus and other affordable phones.

Raw performance is about right for the price.

4G speed is another boasting point of the Hawk, and EE says it has made its mobile internet rev up to 238Mbps at its super-speedy 4G site in Wembley. The phone has CAT 6 LTE, capable of speeds of up to 300Mbps.

In regular old London using a normal EE SIM, the 4G speed tends to sit around 30Mbps: nothing special, but the phone is ready for when the UK is completely covered by ultra-fast 4G in, ooh, 10 years.

Verdict

The EE Hawk doesn't offer the aggressive spec per pound of its Vodafone rivals. However, it is a solid phone with an unusually plush design that gives you some of the flavour of an iPhone for just a fraction of the price.

Its camera won't blow your mind, there are sharper screens and the processor isn't a powerhouse.

But aside from the rear snapper, some of the negatives actually reduce the impact of others, resulting in a perfectly decent daily experience.

Who's this for?

The EE Hawk is for people after a phone that looks and feels quite expensive without the price to match. As it's a network-branded mobile you'll have to be happy to sign up with EE, though.

Should you buy it?

Those who play lots of games and use apps beyond those of social networks may be better off with one of the more tech-saturated large-screen options. If you don't want to be tied to EE, consider a Moto G5 too.

As the internals don't outright impress at the price, the key question is whether you're drawn in by EE's contract or PAYG deals, and the Hawk's smart glass design.

There's a sea of rivals to the EE Hawk, such as the following four.

Samsung Galaxy J3 (2017)

Typical of a budget Samsung, the Galaxy J3 doesn’t quite match the smaller names in terms of pure spec per pound. Its CPU only has four cores, like the Hawk the screen is only 720p, and the graphics processor is less powerful.

A part-aluminium back gets you a touch of class, but the Hawk offers a much more convincing take on high-end design.

Moto G5

Seen as the ‘default’ budget choice by many, the Moto G5 is one of the closest rivals of the Hawk. It has a similarly manageable 5-inch screen, but thanks to a 1080p panel it’s much sharper.

Now that the higher-end Moto G5S has arrived the part-plastic rear of the Moto G5 doesn’t seem as impressive as it did at launch. However, this is still a great choice for those after a phone that lets them pick their own network. And the camera software is significantly better too.

Read our Moto G5 review

Vodafone Smart V8

For just a little more money you can side with Vodafone instead of EE. It gets you more storage, a bigger, more pixel-packed 1080p screen, a better Snapdragon CPU and more RAM.

Power users are probably better off with this phone. The mix of plastic and brushed metal on the Smart V8’s back is less of a pristine look than the full glass of the Hawk, though. And not everyone wants an extra-large display.

Nokia 6

Now available for the same price as the Hawk, the Nokia 6 has more storage (32GB) and a bigger, sharper 5.5-inch 1080p screen. It also uses the more popular Qualcomm Snapdragon breed of chipset.

Add an all-metal back and you have some stiff competition on your hands. The EE Hawk probably looks better, though, its iPhone-like curves and smart rear layout adding an accomplished spark.

Read our Nokia 6 review

First reviewed: January 2018

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