Huawei has come out all guns blazing at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, kicking off proceedings by announcing the Huawei Ascend D quad.

As the name suggests, it's a quad-core handset, running on Huawei's own K3V2 processor, clocked at 1.2/1.5GHz. Huawei is claiming the title of "world's fastest smartphone" for its new Android handset - we'll see just how long that claim lasts.

The phone will sport a 4.5-inch 1280 x 720 pixel resolution display, with a 32-bit true colour graphic processor. It delivers a pixel density of 330ppi, which is sharp indeed.

"We’ve listened to people’s top demands from smartphones: speed, long battery life, high-quality visual and audio capabilities, and a compact, lightweight handset," said Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei Device. "The Huawei Ascend D quad exceeds these expectations." 

The Huawei Ascend D quad also features Dolby audio, an 8-megapixel camera with a backside illuminated sensor, offers Full HD video capture and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. The phone will launch on Android 4, Ice Cream Sandwich.

Huawei Ascend D quad

Packed into a frame that's only 8.9mm thick, the Huawei Ascend D quad sounds like a competitive handset from the company looking to break into the big time.

But the Ascend D is a series of handsets, not just one. Huawei will also be launching variants of this phone, known as the Ascend D quad XL and the Ascend D1.

The Ascend D quad XL comes with a larger 2500mAh battery (compared to the 1800mAh unit in the Ascend D) and this gives it an declared life of 2-3 days - if you accept the increase to 10.9mm, which we happily would. Otherwise the Ascend D quad XL has the same specs as its namesake.

The Ascend D1, however, is a lower-spec device. The D1 sits on a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and has a 1670mAh battery, so should come in cheaper than the other two devices.

The Huawei Ascend D quad devices will be available from Q2 2012, the D1 from April 2012.

As soon as we hear about these devices coming to the UK - either under the Huawei name or as white-label handsets - we'll be sure to let you know.