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]