China's Huawei Unveils Android 4.0 Powered Smartphones

At this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, China’s multinational networking and telecom equipment supplier Huawei (News - Alert) made a big splash. The Chinese telecom equipment giant announced Android (News - Alert) 4.0 based smartphones to compete with high end smartphone makers like Apple, Samsung and others. Media reports indicate that this is a new strategy for a company that lately has been focused on feature rich phones for the low-end, low-cost phone market.

Huawei’s newest Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, is labeled Ascend D. According to Tech Crunch reporter Jordan Crook, Huawei is planning to market it as the “world’s fastest smartphone”. However, Crook thinks that calculating the speed is not that simple. Anyway, the reporter believes that Huawei is calling it the fastest based on the 1.2 GHz quad-core processor used to process the digitized information. And the fact that Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system powers the device.

Other key features of the Huawei smartphone include a 4.5-inch 720p display with a 32-bit true color graphic processor and 330 pp, 8-megapixel rear facing camera capable of video capture in 1080p, as well as a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera. The report also indicates that the smartphone is also very thin. It is about 8.9 mm in profile.

To ensure long battery life so that the smartphone does not die halfway through the day, like many others in the market today, Huawei has included a 1800 mAh battery. In addition, the company is using special power management techniques to get 30 percent more juice, wrote Crook.  Also, Huawei designers have made sure the processing chip temperature stays low.

The report shows that Huawei is offering a few variations in this new line of fastest smartphones. While Ascend D quad XL uses a much larger battery (2500 mAh), the Ascend D1 runs a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor and packs a smaller 1670 mAh battery.

The Huawei smartphones will be available in April. However, the pricing has not been released, according to Crook’s report.