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Huawei Ascend D Quad delayed yet again, homegrown chip to blame

Categories: Android, Huawei
By: , IntoMobile
Wednesday, June 27th, 2012 at 1:35 AM

Back in February of this year at Mobile World Congress, Huawei announced a device called the “Ascend D Quad”. Terribly name aside, it was positioned as being their flagship device. The standout feature? Huawei’s custom K3V2 chip. Said piece of silicon was supposed to blow our socks off with four of ARM’s Cortex A9 processors humming along at 1.5 GHz and an as yet to be announced graphics processor that’s supposedly faster than whatever NVIDIA has in the Tegra 3. According to Huawei’s Head of Consumer Business, Yu Chengdong, that chip is giving the company some serious issues. So much so that the D Quad, which was originally scheduled to ship this summer, is going to enter production in August. That’s half a year between announcement to production. Forget about retail availability, Mr. Chengdong didn’t even address that.

Should you care about this news? Not really. HTC’s quad core device, the One X, has been out on the market for over a month. The Galaxy S III will have its one month anniversary on Friday. Fans of LG, all 53 of them, have been able to buy the Optimus 4X HD for a few weeks now. By the time the D Quad hits store shelves no one is going to care about it. It’ll likely be cheap, but so will a second hand three month old Galaxy S III. And hey, assuming the D Quad does ship in September, that’s just one month before the iPhone 5, one more before Nokia’s first Windows Phone 8 devices, one more before the Galaxy Note II, and two months before the next Nexus.

In other words, Huawei missed the ball, big time. Does this mean the company is screwed? Nope. Their strength is in the budget device segment. They’re trying to shake that reputation, but with the D Quad they’re obviously failing at that mission.

[Via: The Verge]

About The Author

Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.

  • Killa504killa

     I called this on another forum. This phone should have come out on day one. Not week 30! Quad core will be old by their relase date and it wont matter how fast it is. I already have an international GS3.

  • Mitchem

    i will have the latest galaxy this month end and i hope for the 808 end july too….two device is enough for me…i think that according to the price huawei will try to make the recovery for the delay…..

  • Mitchem

    i will have the latest galaxy this month end and i hope for the 808 end july too….two device is enough for me…i think that according to the price huawei will try to make the recovery for the delay…..