Huawei announces the Ascend P6S

Ascend P6S smartphone launched with only subtle alterations to the spec

By Andy Boxall January 20, 2014

Huawei Ascend P6S — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Huawei launched the super slim Ascend P6 all the way back in June last year, a phone about which it made quite a fuss, boasting this was its first truly luxurious premium device. Now, just over six months later, the P6 has been given a very slight refresh and re-released as the Ascend P6S.

However, rather than unveiling it at a London event, Huawei has quietly announced the Ascend P6S in China with almost no fanfare at all. The news comes via Huawei’s own online store, where it’s confirmed this is a relatively basic update. The Ascend P6’s primary claim to fame was it’s 6.18mm thin chassis, making it the world’s slimmest device at the time. The Ascend P6S doesn’t go one step further and drop below 6mm thick, but instead increases the thickness to 6.48mm.

One could imagine this would be to accommodate a larger battery, but sadly, it’s still a 2000mAh cell. This trend continues, as the P6S is almost the same as the P6. The screen is 4.7-inches in size with a 720p resolution, an 8-megapixel camera is fixed to the back of the device, and there’s a big 5-megapixel camera above the screen. The phone still doesn’t have 4G LTE connectivity, and makes do with 3G.

So where are the changes? Huawei has increased the quad-core processor speed to 1.6GHz over 1.5GHz, while the RAM stays at 2GB. Internal memory has been doubled from 8GB to 16GB. Finally, perhaps the worst news, is Android 4.2.2 is still installed with Huawei’s EmotionUI over the top, meaning it’s several versions behind the latest.

At the moment, the Ascend P6S comes in a dual-SIM model, but we can expect a standard single SIM version to be announced soon. Mobile World Congress at the end of February seems like a safe bet on when we could hear more about an international version of the Ascend P6S.

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