Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you're buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
Huawei gives you two keyboard options in the Blaze - the standard Android QWERTY, plus the enhanced third-party offering from Touchpal.
The app can also attempt to guess your next word, just like popular alternate keyboard SwiftKey, so it's possible to type quite a few stock phrases automatically. So it does have its merits.
And to help cope with space restrictions, Touchpal's setting screen enables users to select a different keyboard depending on your screen orientation, so you could opt for the QWERTY when typing in landscape mode, then stick with the more spacious phone keypad when in portrait.
SMS messaging is handled by a simple app that adds coloured speech bubbles to the usual Android tool. It supports audio and visual attachments, even containing a shortcut to the camera app that automatically sets file sizes to minimum settings to ensure they can actually be sent.
Email has again been left to the usual Android POP3/IMAP option, which manages to connect to most popular email accounts with just a username and password. Multiple accounts are handled easily, with a combined inbox pulling everything into one place.
You also get plenty of options for controlling email access. Checking frequency can be set to anything from every five minutes to never, plus web-based email options enable you to set a mail size limit to stop your phone automatically downloading any huge attachments.