Huawei, the world’s sixth largest mobile phone vendor, said on Wednesday that it expects to ship more than 100 million mobile phones in 2012, including 60 million smartphones, Reuters reported. The Chinese company sold a total of 55 million handsets, including 20 million smartphones, in 2011 and is now looking to increase its global market share with a focus on key markets. “We plan to target China, the United States, western Europe and Japan as key markets,” said Shao Yang, chief marketing ...

Not long ago, HTC posted six consecutive months of record revenue thanks to strong demand for its Android-powered smartphones. The company’s record run came to a screeching halt in October last year with the release of Apple’s iPhone 4S. HTC’s fourth quarter earnings fell, missing Wall Street’s expectations, and the rough patch continued in the first quarter of 2012. To compound matters, the latest study conducted by ad network Chitika shows that the troubled handset maker’s us...

Huawei on Wednesday announced global availability of its flagship Ascend P1 smartphone. The Android 4.0-powered handset will be available in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Australia by May, in Latin America by June and in Europe for the summer, with availability in other markets to follow. “The global availability of the Ascend P1, which combines smart features and a sexy design, represents a significant milestone for Huawei Device,” said Richard Yu, Chairman of Huawei. “We are sending strong signa...

Credit Suisse estimates that annual global smartphones sales will surpass 1 billion units in 2014, Reuters reported on Thursday. Global sales are predicted to grow nearly 46% to 687.9 million units this year, and then to reach 1.05 billion units in 2014. The growth is said to be fueled by strong demand in China and the launch of cheaper low-end handsets. “We see robust growth for the smartphone market in China, which we think will account for 22 percent of global units by 2015,” Credit Suisse ana...

Samsung’s market share in the Chinese market is three times larger than Apple’s and still growing, Bloomberg reported on Sunday. The Cupertino-based company recently began to sell its flagship smartphone on the nation’s third largest carrier, China Telecom, in addition China Unicom, which up until recently was the exclusive carrier of the iPhone in China. The new partnership, however, may be too little, too late. “I don’t expect Apple to replace Samsung any time soon,” Gartner ...

Microsoft plans to roll out its Windows Phone “Tango” update for its mobile platform in China some time this year. While the new version of Microsoft’s OS will allow Windows Phones to hit lower price points, Chinese manufacturers are pessimistic about the plan and believe the operating system may not achieve enough success, according to DigiTimes. Android-based smartphones are believed to continue to dominate the Chinese market due to the aggressive marketing of low-end devices from local...

Huawei is making quite a splash at this year’s Mobile World Congress. The company announced one quad-core handset — the Ascend D quad, which is built on the company’s proprietary in-house processor platform — in addition to a dual-core TI OMAP-based device, the Ascend D1. We got a chance to play with both models and, especially in the case of the D quad, we left quite impressed. These things move fast. Really fast. What’s more, these handsets mark Huawei’s entry into the chip makin...

Huawei on Sunday announced the new Ascend D quad smartphone at Mobile World Congress. The company bills the handset as “the world’s fastest quad-core smartphone,” with its 4.5-inch 720p HD display and Huawei’s own K3V2 quad-core 1.5GHz processor. The smartphone features an 8-megapixel rear-camera, 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera and runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Huawei also introduced the Ascend D quad XL and the Ascend D1 smartphones. The Ascend D quad XL boasts a massive 2...

According to a leaked accessory sheet, the HTC Ville and Huawei Prism are headed to T-Mobile in the U.S. The sheet, a screenshot of which was obtained by TmoNews, provides little information outside of device names and “warehouse arrival” dates for various accessories. Accessories, which sometimes arrive weeks before a handset launches, are set to arrive for both devices in early April. BGR exclusively reported this past November that HTC will unveil the Ville at next week’s Mobile World C...

Global smartphone sales increased 47.3% to 149 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to market research firm Gartner. Total smartphone sales for the full year increased 58% to 472 million units and accounted for 31% of all mobile devices sold. The record sales were led by Apple’s iPhone, which sold 37 million units and helped the company capture a 23.8% market share in the fourth quarter. Apple was also the top smartphone vendor in 2011, with a 19% market share. “Western Europe an...

Last summer, Huawei’s MediaPad was one of the first manufactures to ship a device pre-loaded with Android 3.2 Honeycomb. The Chinese company is now attempting a similar strategy with the release of Ice Cream Sandwich. Existing models of the MediaPad will receive an Android 4.0 update by the end of the first quarter, and new MediaPads will come pre-loaded with the software beginning some time the first quarter. Additionally, the tablet will be offered in the current color scheme, and will add sh...

Huawei unveiled the company’s latest Android-powered smartphone, the Ascend P1 S. The device features an incredibly slim design, measuring a mere 6.68mm — even slimmer than Motorola’s 7.1mm DROID RAZR. The device sports a 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display with a 1.5GHz TI OMAP 4460 dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM. On the backside, the Ascend has an 8-megapixel camera with a dual-LED flash and a 1.3-megapixel front facing camera. Huawei also announced the Ascend P1, which packs similar feat...

Handset makers in China have formed an alliance to prepare for possible patent battles with Apple, Microsoft and Nokia. Coolpad, Konka, TCL, ZTE and Lenovo were among the companies named in a report by DigiTimes on Friday. The number of lawsuits filed in China is expected to increase as Microsoft, Nokia and Apple try to increase market share there, the report says. Nokia has already filed patent infringement suits against several Chinese phone makers and Microsoft has gone after Huawei to try to secure a p...

Sprint quietly launched the Express on Friday, a new $20 Android smartphone manufactured by Huawei. The device runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and features a 2.6-inch display with a 320 x 240-pixel resolution, a full QWERTY keyboard, 512MB of RAM, a 1,600 mAh battery, a microSD slow for up to 32GB of storage, a 3.2-megapixel camera and the ability to share its 3G connection via a mobile hotspot feature. The Express is available now for $20 with a new two-year Sprint contract. (more…)