China's Huawei claims world's fastest smartphone

China's Huawei, the third-ranked smartphone maker globally behind giants Samsung and Apple, today unveiled a new mobile, the Ascend P2, which it claims is the fastest in the world.

Sharp-cornered and thinner than a pencil at 8.4mm, the company said it can achieve speeds of 150Mbps, fast enough to download a two-hour high-definition movie in less than five minutes.

The mobile, which has a 4.7-inch, high definition screen, has a powerful 1.5GHz quad-core processor and is able to use the fourth-generation high speed mobile networks being rolled out worldwide.

Unveiling the device on the eve of the opening Monday of the four-day Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the company said it was "the world's fastest smartphone," smashing all previous records.

Huawei said its phone surpassed top speeds of 100Mbps for the fourth-generation network ready versions of Apple's flagship iPhone 5 and Samsung's Galaxy SIII.

The Ascend P2 will launch in France through Orange in June and is also expected to be available worldwide during the second quarter of 2013, it said.

"Ascend P2 downloads HD movies in minutes, and loads online videos, web pages, songs or e-Books in seconds," Huawei said in a company statement issued at the launch.

The phone, which includes a 13 megapixel camera, is the latest shot in Huawei's battle against the fast-growing market's titans Samsung and Apple.

Samsung and Apple accounted for more than half of all smartphone sales in the final quarter of 2012 ¿ 29 per cent for Samsung and 22.1 per cent for Apple ¿ according to research firm Strategy Analytics.

Behind Samsung and Apple, however, Chinese firms held the third, fourth and fifth spots ¿ with 5.3 per cent for Huawei, 4.7 per cent for ZTE and 4.4 per cent for Lenovo.

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