Huawei Ascend P1 S hands-on preview

Huawei’s making a concerted effort to break out of the cheap smartphone market today: that Huawei Ascend P1 S we told you about this morning is a slim, sexy Android 4.0 dual-core machine. We wouldn’t say it’s meaningfully thinner than the thinnest handsets we’ve tried, regardless of the veracity of Huawei’s “world’s thinnest” claim, but as far as we can see the 4.3-inch Super AMOLED display is as bright and beautiful as you’d expect (though there’s a good bit of bezel), Android 4.0 felt fairly speedy and the handset played back smooth 720p (locally stored) video on the dual-core TI OMAP processor. The plastic construction is light and solid, not unlike Samsung’s Galaxy S II line-up. It looks like Huawei’s got a number of colored shells on hand, with white, red and yellow cases all in attendance. Interestingly enough, Huawei’s got a custom Android skin on here, though it wasn’t on by default: if you pick “Switch to 3D Home” from the stock homescreen settings page, you can see what it looks like. Oh, and despite running Android 4.0, there’s a set of capacitive Back, Home and Menu keys! More pictures in the gallery below.

Huawei says the P1 S and its slightly chubbier brother the P1 will arrive in North America, Europe, Australia, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region in April.