Huawei Ascend P6 available on pre order at Carphone Wharehouse

Carphone Wharehouse, one of the UK’s largest phone retailers, is taking pre-orders for the Huawei Ascend P6 Android phone, with an estimated delivery date of 4th July.

Huawei is one of China’s biggest technology companies, and one of the third biggest sellers of mobile phones worldwide (having sold 11.2 million phones at the end of 2012, third only to Samsung and Apple).

The Ascend P6 packs some impressive stats, on paper, and the photo’s give it a very modern style. The sales pitch from Carphone Wharehouse states that the case is made of aluminum with an 4.7 inch screen with Gorilla Glass 2 to prevent scratches. As you can see from the photo at the top of the article, the device is very thin, only 6.18mm thick.

Despite it’s wee size, the P6 boasts a 2,000mAh battery, 1.5Ghz quad core processor, 2Gb of RAM and an 720p HD screen. It also has two camera’s, one on the front, one on the back, which is standard now days. What’s impressive is the quality of the cameras. The rear camera is a 8MP camera, more or less standard on most devices now days. The front camera, however, is an impressive 5MP. This will mean we can expect a slew of sharp selfies being posted to Instagram from any owner of this phone. My concern though, is for video calling. 5MP will mean a lot better picture, yes, but that will mean more bandwidth required on video calls. It is often possible to downscale the quality of the image the camera takes, but this seems pretty pointless.

The onboard memory of the P6 is only 8GB, which seems quite small, but considering the rest of the power in the phone, a reasonable trade-off. On the up side, you can increase the total size of the storage to just under 40GB when using a 32GB Micro SD card.

The Huawei Ascend P6 comes packed with Android Jelly Bean 4.2 as well as a raft of software from Huawei which will help you to customise your phone, and help keep your battery life up.

Carphone Warehouse are selling the P6 for a good price on a monthly and PAYG plan, starting from £21 (€24.75/$32.18) a month getting the phone for free. SIM free, you’re looking to buy the phone for £329.95 (€388.73/$505.63).

For the price, this is a nice piece of kit and worth considering if the other “big dogs” are out of you price range. Pre-order your Ascend P6 from Carphone Wharehouse here.