Over on Cricket Wireless they have the Huawei Ascend, but today they have announced the Ascend II. The fun part is this phone features Android 2.3 Gingerbread and will only cost you $129 without a contract. Yes let me say this one more time, an Android 2.3 Gingerbread phone with a 3.5″ display and a 5 MP camera all for $129 and you don’t have to sign your arm and legs away to the carrier. Yes Please!
The weakest link here is the phone runs off a 600 Mhz CPU, but recent mid-range phones from Samsung and HTC run with similar spec’d processors and all run fine so we see no reason to feel any different here. Android 2.3 Gingerbread is smooth and stable so this phone should be perfect for those on Cricket. The phone is technically $179.99 but a web-only introductory offer has it for $50 off, making it $129.
Huawei has a good plan in place because they are offering a phone with the latest software for a great price, yes they might not be up to par with build quality of say HTC, but for the price you can’t really complain. Toss that in with Cricket’s $55 unlimited everything Android plan and you have one great setup for a low price. Latest reports suggest the build quality is much improved over recent Huawei handsets, see the picture below of the back and camera of the Ascend II to see what I mean. Press release available via source link.
[via Leap Wireless]
The phone is sleek, user friendly, customizable and fun. But the biggest factor in deciding to purchase the Huawei Ascend II for me was the 5.0MP camera. Imagine my surprise when my first photo, on the highest quality settings in broad daylight, looked like a watercolor painting. It’s a flat-out falsehood.