Huawei Ascend P2

Available now
27th February 2013

Billed by Huawei as the fastest LTE smartphone to date, the Huawei Ascend P2 shows the increasing capabilities of this growing Chinese manufacturer.

Huawei say that the Ascend P2 has download speeds of up to 150 Mbps on an LTE Category 4 network. That's pretty impressive, but most of us are probably still stuck with 3.5G connections, so a owning a device like this would be a bit like trying to drive a Bugatti Veyron at top speed around the M25 at rush hour.

Other than the blindingly fast LTE support, the Ascend P2 is a powerful Android 2.1 device with a quad-core 1.5GHz processor with 1GB of RAM, 16GB of onboard storage, a 4.7" 720 x 1280 pixel display, plus a 13 megapixel primary camera and 1.3 megapixel secondary one. The Ascend P2 also has all the usual Android features such as WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity plus GPS and GLONASS positioning support, along with NFC support in some markets too. It would obviously be quite a nice device to use, but you could equally as well buy any one of a couple of dozen other devices on the market that do that same thing.

The Huawei Ascend P2 is smart looking in a generic sort of way, measures 136 x 67 x 8.4mm and weighs a modest 122 grams. Inside is a relatively large 2420 mAh battery which is quoted as being good for about 13 days standby time. Available colours are "Snow White" and "Black Rock" if our translations from Chinese are correct.

At the moment only one carrier has been confirmed for the Ascend P2, and that is Orange in France who presumably have the sort of LTE network needed to get the best out of it and will stock it from June 2013 onwards. We would expect specialist retailers to be able to get hold of it too, at an estimated street price of €399.