Its a Sunday with a day away before the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2012 kicks off in sunny Barcelona, Spain, and, we have already seen LG, Fujitsu announcing top-line high-spec smartphones. LG took two steps ahead with its aggressive LTE multi-core smartphone strategy targeting high value developed markets launching its latest quad-core LTE superphone LG Optimus 4X HD powered with NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor sporting a true 720 HD IPS display running the latest Android 4.0 ICS.

The quad-core play was on the cards from the Korean & Japanese vendors at MWC 2012, but the biggest surprise of the pre-MWC announcements has been by Huawei, the world's sixth largest handset vendor. The fast growing Chinese vendor has been looking forward to extend its portfolio up in the high- to premium-tier segment with cutting-edge high-spec handsets challenging big boys such has Samsung, LG and HTC in smartphone race. This intent was depicted today as Huawei unveiled premium-tier handsets under its new Diamond Series : Huawei Ascend D Quad, Ascend D quad XL, Ascend D1 building upon its "Ascend" sub-branding with earlier promising announcements of Ascend P1/P1S at CES 2012 last month.

To add to this, the vendor's new lineup is powered not by NVIDIA, TI or Qualcomm's solutions but surprisingly by its home-grown K3V2 quad-core 1.2GHz/1.5GHz processor. The vendor claims it to be the world?s fastest quad core smartphone and features a proprietary power management system which provides up to 30% in energy savings. The Ascend D series scores high with top-notch specs and design to make it top-selling Android portfolio and compete on par or maybe higher with bigger Android vendors:  

        
  • Fast Processor: 1.2/1.5GHz K3V2 quad-core Processor
  • Operating System: Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
  • Large High Resolution Screen: 4.5-inch 720p HD screen
  • Form Factor: 64mm narrow and 8.9mm slim slate  
  • Radios: HSPA+, LTE 
  • Camera: 8MP Rear Camera with 1080p HD Video Recording, 1.3MP Forward-Facing Camera
  • Battery: From 1670mAh to 2500mAh battery

 

Image Credits: Huawei

Huawei, thus has learnt quickly from its competitors in key areas such as powerful sub-branding (Ascend), slimmer design and bigger battery, multi-core chipsets, hint of vertically integrated play (in-house chipset design)  in producing a premium offering.