Huawei's Ascend W1 represents the company's first foray into Windows Phone 8. Boasting a cyan coloured back and matte-effect plastic all round, it fits in nicely to the usual Windows Phone landscape

Our quick take

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The handset is fairly compact at 10.15mm thick, feeling and looking like a mix between a Lumia phone and an 8X. The 4-inch IPS touch screen is nice but a lot of that smooth, slick feel of Windows Phone 8 appears to have been lost on the phone.

huawei ascend w1 pictures and hands on image 5

The W1 we played with was fairly laggy, slower even we would say than the Lumia 620. The IPS element of things does however make for some tasty viewing angles and decent brightness and colour reproduction.

With a resolution of 480 x 800, it/s not exactly sharp compared to, say, the Lumia 920, but the simplicity of WP8 means it gets away with it to an extent, apart from when doing text-heavy things like web browsing.

Inside the phone is a Snapdragon S4 MSM8230 dual-core 1.2GHz chip with a Adreno 305 GPU. Keeping it powered along is a 1950mAh battery. Huawei is promising 470 housr of standby, which is a lot, possibly explaining why the phone is a touch laggy as it may be underclocked, although we can't be sure.

The 5-megapixel camera was fun, although low resolution. There isn't any pricing yet for this O2 UK exclusive phone, but we imagine it won't be massively expensive. 

huawei ascend w1 pictures and hands on image 1

All in all, a good first venture into the world of Windows Phone for Huawei, with the lagginess being forgivable if the price is right.

Given how mad Huawei has gone on Android, however, with the Ascend D2, we might be inclined to wait and see what other shaped Windows Phone devices they release, especially given hints yesterday at a CES for new products at MWC.