Huawei Ascend D quad Hands-on Review

Probably for the first time ever, we're not going to begin a Huawei hands-on with the words that we're surprised by the good execution of the phone in question. Nope. This time, we'll just say – as it was expected, Huawei made a bang with its new devices here at MWC 2012. Upon meeting the new handsets and tablets available here, all of our already few doubts were gone.

The most interesting new phone by Huawei at MWC was the quad-core Huawei Ascend D Quad – a top-end model that will try to capture the hearts of all the geeks out there, and maybe a pretty decent chunk of the average consumer market.

The design of the handset is quite contradictory, to say the least. On one hand, it's pretty good - the handset is quite thin and has a more conservative look. On the other, it seems like a direct rip-off of the Galaxy S II. Well, we can live with it, but we'd like to see Huawei think of something that it can really call its own. In terms of feel, it's more on the plasticy side, no bold moves here.


The thing about the Huawei Ascend D Quad is that it actually sports a lot of great features to please every hardcore smartphone user. The phone relies on Huawei's own K3V2 quad-core processor, and it also comes with a gig of RAM.

The screen is another highlight of the device. It measures 4.5", so there's plenty of screen real estate, while in the meantime the device doesn't feel overly bulky. Not only this, but the resolution is HD, so the Ascend D Quad also performs well on the pixel density front. We really like the fact that Huawei has started using top-notch screen technologies. In this case, the Ascend D Quad has an IPS-LCD screen, so you shouldn't worry about the color quality and the viewing angles.


OK, so we've come to believe that some not so popular companies in the phone biz (like Huawei), are doing fine with hardware, but they aren't very good at software. Thankfully, Huawei is getting on the right track, because the Ascend D Quad runs Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box. By the looks of it, there won't be any personalizations done to the stock user interface, and we actually don't mind that. Of course, the handset is incredibly snappy, due to the quad-core chipset. Right now, there's no specific launch date announced, but the handset should become available sometime during Q2 2012, and boy are we excited for this new entrant into the industry!

It's also worth mentioning that we got to play with some variants of the Ascend D Quad. And by "variants" here, we mean the Huawei Ascend D Quad XL, the D1 and the D1 LTE. Basically, the first one is the same as the Ascend D Quad, but comes with a larger battery. The D1 is a dual-core version of the Ascend D Quad, so we expect it to come with a slightly more bearable price tag. Finally, the D1 LTE is the same as the D1, but... you guessed it, with LTE connectivity.


So these are pretty much all the interesting details around the new Huawei Ascend smartphones for now. We are definitely looking forward to spending some more time with them, especially the Ascend D Quad, which shapes up to be one very, very promising smartphone.