Cricket Wireless will begin offering an entry-level Android device by Huawei later this month, dubbed the Ascend. It’ll sit alongside the Kyocera Zio as Cricket’s second Android phone, and cost $150 off contract after rebates. You get what you pay for, mind you: it has a 3.2 megapixel camera that shoots CIF video, 3.5″ HVGA capacitive touch display, and runs Android 2.1 with some custom work done on top. Cricket will be launching a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot called the CrossWave alongside the Huawei Ascent in mid-October.
As far as cheap, prepaid Android phones go, the Ascent looks pretty nice. I’ve had some time with the similarly-priced Huawei U8100 on Wind Mobile, but it looks like the Ascend performs much more smoothly. Now that Android is hitting the budget range and isn’t wholly sequestered to expensive upper-tier smartphones, the platform has a chance spread to the mass market. We’re already seeing a lot of that growth in research numbers, and the more manufacturers that Google can get using their OS, the more their progress is likely to accelerate.
[via Engadget]