MWC 2012: Huawei overview

Huawei Ascend D quad hands-on

Here's the Android smartphone everybody will be talking about this year. The Ascend D quad is Huawei's first true attempt at becoming the king of the Android hill.

And at first glance it ticks all the boxes. It's built around a 4.5-inch IPS+ display rocking a 720p (1280x720 pixels) HD resolution and 330 ppi pixel density. With this kind of screen specs, it's poking fun at the iPhone 4S.

The display is simply gorgeous and Huawei claim the sunlight legibility is awesome and at this point we are inclined to believe them.

Under the hood, the Ascend D quad, as the name suggests, features Huawei's very own quad-core K3V2 processors with 1.2GHz and 1.5GHz clock speed variations. The Chinese have coupled this with 1GB of RAM and, as a result, the Ascend D quad literally flies through everything in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Speaking of ICS, Huawei haven't done a lot of work to it, which could indicate that they won't be any custom skins or other addons when the device starts shipping. We tried playing a full HD 1080p video and the Ascend D quad didn't break a sweat. Even when randomly jumping from the start to the middle and the end, and back, lags and stutter were virtually non-existent.

The Ascend D quad measures 129mm x 64mm x 8.9mm and, with its 130 grams of weight, it hits the sweetspot for a Droid with such powerful internals.

The design of the device is pleasant and doesn't exude cheapness. The back of the Ascend D quad is especially nice with its special texture, which feels good to the touch. The red outline of the camera unit and the red speaker grille are nice accents.

Speaking of the camera, it's a 1080p video-capable 8MP auto-focus unit with a dual LED flash. At the front, there's an 1.3MP HD camera, which can shoot 720p video, if you ever need it to.

Huawei also bragged about their special dual-microphone noise cancellation technology dubbed earSmart. Add that to the 1800mAh battery, Bluetooth 3, Wi-Fi 802.11n and 5.1 surround sound with Dolby Mobile 3.0 Plus and the Ascend D quad becomes quite a package.

Huawei Ascend D1 hands-on

The Huawei Ascend D1 debuted right after the flagship Ascend D quad and sets aim at the mid-range Androids out there. This time around, it's not powered by a Huawei chip, but by a TI OMAP 4460 with a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM.

Display-wise, the D1 packs a 4.5-inch, 720p IPS+ screen of 330ppi.

At the back, the Ascend D1 features an 8MP, 1080p video recording camera with dual LED flash. A 1.3MP snapper at the front takes care of video conferencing and does 720p video, too.