Huawei joins the Windows Phone 8 platform with the Ascend W1

After numerous leaks in the past, Huawei has made official its first Windows Phone 8 offering on the first day of CES. The low to mid range device should offer Huawei's traditional value for money retail pricing. The device itself will be available in China and Russia this month before spreading to Europe, North America and other markets.

The Ascend W1 has a good enough Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor humming along at 1.2 GHz combined with the Adreno 305 GPU and 512 MB of memory to power the 4 inch WVGA display. While Windows Phone 8 does bring with it support for higher resolutions Huawei has skipped on a better panel in the price of cost cutting.

Internal storage is rather limited at 4 GB, of which roughly half will be open to the user. Fortunately there is a microSD slot with support for cards up to 32 GB in size. The rear camera is a modest 5 MP and for a cheaper device it's good to see Huawei including a 0.3 MP webcam. The battery is rather beefy for a smaller device at 1950 mAh and Huawei claims it has best-in-class battery life.

KitGuru says: While it won't shatter sales record, those looking for an entry level smartphone will find solitude in the Huawei Ascend W1.

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