Huawei teams with Phones 4U to push own brand

Following on from the recent revelation that Huawei is to follow ZTE into the own brand handset market, the Chinese vendor has announced a partnership with UK retailer Phones 4U to bring Huawei-branded devices to market in the fourth quarter.

The partnership will start with Phones 4U retailing Huawei’s flagship Vision and Blaze Android-based devices, which for the first time will sport the Chinese firm’s brand. To date, Huawei, like compatriot ZTE, and Taiwanese player HTC, has restricted itself to white label devices. But just as the two Chinese companies have made significant headway in the infrastructure space, they are now seeking to push their brand into the consumer devices market.

The Huawei Vision and Blaze smartphones will run on Android Gingerbread 2.3 Os, with the Vision supported by a1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM 8255 processor. There’s not much else that’s been revealed about the Vision but the Blaze will come in at the lower end of the market, retailing for around £100, and will feature Android Gingerbread 2.3, a 3.2-inch touchscreen, a 3.2MP camera, 256MB of RAM and 512MB of onboard storage.