[Ben]

Dongle darling, master of MiFi, and equipment maker extraordinaire Huawei has another smartphone on the way. Huawei manufactured the Pulse, available on T-Mobile, which appears to have been relatively successful.

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2010/08/27/huawei-embraces-android-in-new-smartphone/

I think Huawei could become a real force in handsets running Android if they choose to be. I doubt we'll see anything too innovative or high end, but what we will see is low cost and decent performance.

[hecatae]

should be the Huawei U8150, but we will never see it under that name, maybe a Pulse, Pulse Mini or Vodafone 845

[miffed]

I agree , Although the Pulse Mini appeared to disappoint (seemingly , from what some have said ) I am still absolutely blown away by the amount of phone that I got for £91 with the original Pulse . compare it to the Nokia 5230 I recently acquired for a similar price and you'd think you were looking at devices seperated by £200 or so !
I think they could own the budget end of the Android market in te same way they own mobile broadband now , and who knows what kind of mid-high end effort they could offer after a little practice ?

[Ben]

Looks decent enough. If the price is right then hopefully this is just one more handset that'll be bringing Android to the masses.

That said, I do have my reservations about Android. I play with my Nexus One and it certainly seems functional but it's also very cold. Lacks identity. But then that's Google through and through. This handset will, I believe, lack any sort of manufacturer OS customisation. Now I'm sure a lot of manufacturers probably do more harm than good, but Sense by HTC, for example, seems to be well received.

[hecatae]

Huawei U8150 is going to be called Huawei Ideos, £99 - £129 on PAYG.

and a new mifi called the E5S, they had a press day yesterday


Huawei's Ideos smartphone, announced today, is claimed by the company as the first affordable handset to ship with Android 2.2, the most up-to-date release of Google's phone platform.

I was briefly shown the new device at a launch event in London, and my first impression is that the handset looks like a smaller, neater version of last year's T-Mobile Pulse (which Huawei also manufactured).

The Ideos has a vanilla build of Android 2.2, with no user interface customisations such as HTC has with its Sense user interface. This is partly because Huawei co-developed the handset with Google, but also because such changes get in the way of users upgrading as soon as a new Android release is available, the company said

For a £99 phone, the Ideos looks pretty good and feels very responsive. Its screen doesn't appear to match up to the display quality of high-end devices such as the HTC Desire, but this is pretty much to be expected.

The Ideos does away with the mini trackball of the Pulse, and replaces this with a decent-sized five-way navigation key, which will frankly come as a relief to most users.

In the brief time I had to play with the Ideos, I was impressed with its on-screen soft keyboard, which seemed less tricky to use than on many touch-screen phones I've seen, Including Apple's iPhone, despite the relatively small 2.8in screen.

Huawei did not disclose the weight of the device, but it felt light compared to some high-end devices, and certainly no problem to carry around in a pocket.

Final judgement is reserved until V3.co.uk gets a review sample for a longer trial, but if the Ideos really is available at £99 SIM-free, it could prove a popular handset for those trading up to their first smartphone.

[hecatae]

http://pdadb.net/index.php?m=specs&id=2562&c=huawei_ideos_u8150-b