Huawei could be the next company to follow Samsung and HTC’s lead, and offer a stripped-back ‘Google Edition’ of its latest handset, the Ascend P6.
Kevin Ho, president of Huawei’s handset product division, told Pocket-Lint the company is in talks about making a P6 that’ll run stock Android. “We are working with Google to analyse the possibility of bringing out a Huawei Ascend P6 with Google Edition,” he said. But this goes against what the company said previously.
At the launch of the P6 in London, Huawei’s chairman Richard Yu claimed the company’s Emotion UI was far better than stock Android, offering “hundreds of improvements”. Emotion UI is better in touch with users’ “emotions”, Yu concluded. As you’d hope, with a name like that.
That’s all well and good, but the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 Google Editions have piqued the interest of the great phone-buying public, and that’s what really counts. Huawei could well have noticed, and be about to perform a reverse ferret, as it’s known in journalism.
The Ascend P6 was unveiled this week, and at 6.2mm slim, it’s being touted as the thinnest mobile ever made. With a 4.7-inch, 1,280×720-pixel resolution screen, it’s nowhere near as big or sharp as the One or S4. But that front is practically all screen. Inside is a 1.5GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM. The camera on the front is 5-megapixels, while the back one packs a healthy 8 megapixels.
It’ll be out in July. My colleague Luke Westaway went hands-on with the device — you can read his verdict here.
Would you be tempted by a Google Edition Ascend P6? Should more companies offer the pure Android experience? Or do you want the bells and whistles their UIs come laden with? Let me know in the comments, or on our stock Facebook-running Facebook page.