Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei has a reputation of producing budget smartphones, but its latest model — the Ascend P1 — aims a little higher. It's just 7.7mm thick, runs the latest Android Ice Cream Sandwich software and has a large 4.3in Super AMOLED touchscreen.
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The Huawei Ascend P1 is an almost identical handset to the Ascend P1 S with a slight difference in size. The Ascend P1 is 7.7mm thick, whereas the Ascend P1 is the world's slimmest smartphone at just 6.68mm. Thickness aside, the only other difference between these two models is the battery capacity. The Ascend P1 is powered by a 1670mAh battery, while the thinner Ascend P1 S gets a slightly larger 1800mAh battery.
Under the hood there's nothing really remarkable about the Huawei Ascend P1. It has a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED touchscreen with a resolution of 960x540 and a gorilla glass coating to prevent scratches and cracks. Huawei has equipped the handset with a dual-core 1.5GHz TI OMAP 4460 Cortex-A9 processor, 1GB of RAM and 4GB of internal memory. Thankfully, there is also a microSD card slot for extra storage.
Perhaps the best feature of the Huawei Ascend P1 S is that it comes with the latest Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system out of the box. Google's latest software is currently running on very few smartphones, so it's great to see a smaller manufacturer like Huawei up to date on the software front.
Other notable features of the Huawei Ascend P1 include an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera with dual LED flash and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video calling. The rear camera doubles as a 1080p video recorder.
The Huawei Ascend P1 is a quad-band HSDPA device, so it will work on all three major Australian networks — Telstra (850MHz) and Optus/Vodafone (900MHz/2100MHz). However, Huawei has refused to reveal which Australia operators will sell the device, only saying it will be available in Australia from May.
