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Huawei introduces Ascend P6 as "world's slimmest smartphone"
Huawei introduces Ascend P6 as "world's slimmest smartphone"
China's Huawei unveiled its flagship smartphone, the Ascend P6, at its first standalone launch event on Tuesday, underlining its ambitions to compete with Apple and Samsung in the top tier of mobile technology.
Huawei is fond of crafting creepily thin phones, and the P6 is no exception, measuring a slender 6.18 millimeters (0.24-inch) thick. The aluminium edges are very reminiscent of the iPhone, but the bottom of the phone is rounded, giving the P6 a tiny bit of original flair.
The company picked the launch date - 6/18 (June 18) - to tie in with the smartphone's dimensions.
The launch, at an arts venue in North London, takes a cue from Apple and Samsung, both of which have made new product announcements at high profile events for a number of years.
Like the P2, the P6 sports a 4.7-inch 720p display, and plays host to a quad-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz. There's an 8-megapixel camera glued to its rump, while unusually, the front-facing snapper is a 5-megapixel affair, making the P6 ideal for Skype calls or carefully-posed sexy selfies.
Inside you'll find a 1.5GHz quad-core chip powering the P6, backed up by a hearty 2GB of RAM. There's 8GB of on-board storage, which you can beef up using a microSD card if you need more capacity.
The battery is a 2,000mAh unit, which is smaller than the P2's 2,420mAh battery. Fingers crossed that doesn't see the P6 running out of juice halfway through the day.
The P6 is powered by Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, though Huawei has liberally slathered its own Emotion interface over the top. The Emotion UI brings a host of quirky, optional visual themes that help to keep the interface feeling fresh, though unusually there's no app tray, so all your apps live on the phone's homescreen a la iPhone.
That's no disaster, but you will need to keep your apps carefully organised or they could become hard to track down in a hurry.
Unlike the P2, the P6 doesn't have any 4G capability, so you'll need to make do with boring old 3G for your downloads and Web browsing. That could save you a bit of battery life, but is unlikely to satisfy speed freaks who crave lightning-fast downloads.
Industry analyst Ben Wood at CCS Insight said that at the right price the Ascend P6 would attract buyers who had not considered Huawei before.
"Huawei P6 is darn thin," he tweeted. But he added that the device was not, at this stage, compatible with the high speed, next generation 4G networks, which are being rolled out across the world.
Carolina Milanesi at Gartner said she would have liked to see a more original design instead of something that tries to position the brand as an alternative to Apple by going with a similar rounded metal design.
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