Huawei knows its newest LTE smartphone is one of many new products coming this week at the Mobile World event, but the Chinese giant seems confident that nothing coming up will be faster than the Ascend P2. The company says the phone can download data at speeds as fast as 150 megabits per second thanks to its LTE category 4 chip. Huawei makes chipsets as well as smarpthones, tablets and of course networking equipment. However, the company did not say today whether it manufactured the LTE modem used in the Ascend P2.
The Ascend P2 runs Android 4.1, which is not the most current version of the operating system, and Huawei has customized the interface with its own Emotion user interface. The phone sports a Gorilla Glass 4.7-inch display, the exact same size as HTC’s new HTC One introduced last week. The iPhone 5 has a 4-inch screen and the Samsung Galaxy S3’s screen measures 4.8 inches.
The new smartphone is powered by a 1.5 GHz quad-core processor, and has a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. It has a 2,420 mAh battery, 16 gigabytes of internal storage and one gigabyte of RAM. Huawei introduced the device by saying that with this smartphone, the company has “grown up,” implying that the company perhaps feels ready to take on Samsung and Apple.
While Huawei has gotten lots of attention from the U.S. media and government for its ascension in the telecom infrastructure market, the company has also been making big strides in the device arena. According to the latest research from IDC, Huawei sold more smartphones worldwide in the fourth quarter than any other vendor except for Samsung and Apple.
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