Huawei Ascend W1 will go on sale with O2 from March 7

Huawei’s Ascend W1 will go on sale on March 7 exclusively with O2, the manufacturer has confirmed

Huawei’s Ascend W1 will go on sale on March 7 in the UK on O2, both the carrier and the manufacturer have confirmed, and the inclusion of a new, budget friendly Windows Phone 8 device to the roster may be just what Microsoft’s mobile OS needs to propel it to new heights.

The device will go on sale for just £119.99 on prepay (from free on contract) and users can snap it up in Electric Blue on launch day, or Electric Pink from March 18.

The Huawei Ascend W1 is a great entry-level option which offers a nice 4-inch IPS LCD screen, dual-core Qualcomm S4 CPU, clocked to 1.2GHz, Adreno 305 GPU, and a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and, of course, Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 operating system which has been slowly but surely gaining support throughout the country.

WP8 builds on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform to deliver a solid, simple experience to users who don’t want to spend their entire day wading through menus and applications looking for their commonly accessed data via its intuitive Live Tile system.

The Ascend W1 also comes packed with 512MB RAM, 4GB of on-board storage space plus space for a micro SD card, and a fairly meaty 1950mAh battery, so you should be able to keep the whole package up and running throughout a hectic day.

Naturally you also get Huawei’s build quality and a solid, polycarbonate chassis which feels not entirely dissimilar to Nokia’s Lumia range, and in fact the devices share a common price point, but while some users may be drawn to Nokia’s pedigree others will doubtless seek out the speedier CPU and higher capacity battery of the Ascend W1 – so it should be a good fight to see which device takes the Windows Phone 8 top-spot over the coming months.



by via Know Your Mobile