Huawei finally reveal the Ascend W1 at CES

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After rather a lot of speculation online, Huawei have officially unveiled their Windows Phone at CES. The Ascend W1 comes with a 4 inch 480x800 IPS screen, a slightly underwhelming dual core 1.2GHz processor, a 5 megapixel camera, and just 4GB of storage. It's clearly aimed at the budget conscious smartphone buyers.

Thankfully microSD is supported so you can load up a decent amount of media without using up the frugal internal storage, but I'm still drawn to that low internal storage value and wondering why Microsoft have put some decent minimum specs in place for everything except internal storage.

From the press release:

"Inspired and powered by people, the Ascend W1 is a combination of Huawei's user-centric design philosophy and Windows Phone 8 software, bringing consumers a truly compelling alternative." said Richard Yu, CEO, Huawei Consumer Business Group. "The addition of the Ascend W1 to our smartphone portfolio gives consumers access to an even wider range of Huawei smartphones. At a price that makes sense to consumers, Ascend W1 underscores our commitment to put smartphones within reach of every consumer, no matter who you are or what you want from your phone."

Oh and the design is inspired by a tropical island... In any case we'll hopefully have a closer look at the Ascend W1 when it reaches the UK in the next few weeks - Mobile network O2 have announced they will be carrying the device, while Huawei have indicated that networks in Russia and China will also have the handset in stock.

Huawei are promising a stand-by time of 470 hours with the 1950 mAh battery in the handset, and it will be good to see how that translates to the real world with talk time and Internet connectivity.

What's not been mentioned is the price, but with the specs on offer, we're hoping this is going to be a competitively priced Windows Phone device geared to the pre-pay and budget markets.

Source / Credit: Huawei Press Release