Huawei's Ascend Mate may have been shown off in several leaks leading up to CES, but it's always good to see an unannounced device make the jump from Rumorville to Officialdom, and that's what the 6.1-inch Mate has just done. Huawei today made the Ascend Mate officially official at its CES 2013 press event, confirming that the handset does indeed feature a 6.1-inch 720p IPS+ LCD display. There's also an 8-megapixel camera on the Ascend Mate's backside, 1-megapixel shooter on its front, and buried inside its large frame is a 1.5GHz quad-core processor and 4,050mAh battery.
On the software side of the Ascend Mate, users will find Android 4.1 Jelly Bean running beneath Huawei's custom overlay. In order to help with one-handed operation of the 6.1-inch behemoth, Huawei will also be including some one-hand UI features like a shrunken keyboard and dialpad, which you can find and example of right here.
Moving down a bit in size from "Wow, that's massive!" to "Hey, that's a big phone," Huawei also announced the Ascend D2. This one's got a 5-inch 1080p IPS+ LCD display, which is more than an inch smaller than the screen found on its Mate sibling but is also of a higher resolution. Also included is a 1.5GHz quad-core processor, 13-megapixel rear camera (which Huawei says has a manual color temperature adjustment function for photogs that are into that sort of thing), 1.3-megapixel front shooter, 2GB RAM, 32GB storage and a 3,000mAh battery to power the whole show.
Huawei says that the body of the D2 is aluminum with a metal frame, with the whole package that measures in at 9.9mm thick. The D2's body also features a curved design for more comfortable handling. Other features of the D2's outer shell include a Gorilla Glass screen and IPX5/4 dust and water resistance, meaning that the new handset ought to be able to withstand some abuse.
As far as availability goes, Huawei says that the Ascend D2 will be hitting China sometime in January 2013, with the Ascend Mate set to follow with its own Chinese launch in February. There's no word yet on any sort of U.S. launch for either the D2 or the Mate, but Huawei's spec sheet for the latter of the two shows that it has pentaband UMTS support, so it should play nice with AT&T and T-Mobile 3G if any big phone aficionado out there feels that they must have the 6.1-inch Mate in their life. Would any of you be interested in picking up either the Ascend D2 or Ascend Mate if they were given a proper U.S. launch?
Via Huawei (1), (2)
