MWC 2012: Huawei overview

Huawei booth

We also stopped by the Huawei booth at the MWC to spend some more quality time with their newly announced products.

Huawei Ascend D quad

We are pleased to report the great first impression of the Huawei Ascend D quad stood after our second meeting. The quad core smartphone feels impressively snappy and its HD IPS+ LCD is a joy to behold.

The smartphone handles quite decently, its rubberized back providing a decent amount of grip. The pattern that you see on the back is actually paint and the plastic is perfectly smooth. It is still quite resistant to fingerprint smudges, though.

Huawei Ascend D quad

We looked closer this time and we still couldn't find any customizations to the stock Android 4.0.3 on the Huawei Ascend D quad. The smartphone feels like a Galaxy Nexus, except for the part that it's much faster to navigate around.

And while the custom skins add a bit to usability (most notably TouchWiz and Sense), stock Android should fare better in terms of update speed. With no custom skins to worry about, Huawei will just need to modify the chipset drivers of the D quad every time a new Android release comes out and it will be ready to go.

Huawei Ascend D quad

The custom Huawei chipset is still somewhat of a mystery in terms of specs (the GPU maker is unknown as well as the core architecture), but the performance is obviously there. We guess we'll be able to find more about it in the coming months as the monstrous smartphone nears launch.

Huawei Ascend D1

The Huawei Ascend D1 is, for the most part, identical to its more powerful sibling. It has the same HD screen and the same design, it even uses the same materials for the finish.

The only way to tell the Ascend D1 apart from the D quad is the paintjob at the back, which mimics carbon fiber here.

Huawei Ascend D1

Naturally, the biggest difference is under the hood - Huawei Ascend D1 comes with a TI OMAP 4460 chipset, which has two Cortex A9 cores, clocked at 1.5GHz and no fancy 16-core GPU. Of course, performance is still more than adequate, but you can sense the difference if you use the two Ascend smartphones side by side.

Huawei Ascend D1

The Huawei Ascent duo certainly looks set to give the big guys a run for their money. The company says they are going to price their smartphones about 15-20% lower than competitors and it appears that won't come at the cost of user experience.