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Chinese electronics company Huawei just made bold claims at MWC when its chairman, Richard Yu, said the Ascend D Quad is the world's fastest phone. Naming another milestone, Huawei has announced plans for the first 10-inch tablet powered by a quad-core processor.

Called the MediaPad10 FHD, the slate uses a similar 1.5GHz K3 CPU Huawei expects to place in the Ascend D Quad. Another alluring attribute you'll find in the MediaPad FHD is a 10-inch IPS LCD screen with a supersharp resolution of 1,920x1,200 pixels. Dolby Surround Sound audio processing will be onboard as well, along with an 8-megapixel main camera and 1.3-megapixel front-facing shooter.

Of course I thought the first 10-inch quad-core tablet was the Asus Transformer Prime. Truth be told, that's a 10.1-inch quad-core tablet, so perhaps Huawei is really splitting hairs here. … Read more

Over the last month, CNET has written a lot about an upcoming trade show called Mobile World Congress. And over the next week, we'll be writing even more about it.

If you've never heard of the event before, I don't blame you. Indeed, Mobile World Congress doesn't have the same name recognition that CES commands in the United States, but for the wireless world, it's almost as big and just as significant. Each February, folks from all corners of the industry and around the world meet in Barcelona, Spain, to make deals, demonstrate the latest technologies, and show off the latest and greatest phones and tablets.

This will be my fifth year at the show, which begins Monday in Catalonia's Gaudi-obsessed capital city. Though a possible transit strike threatens to make getting around a little difficult, there's guaranteed to be a (metric) ton of new devices, from the very fancy to the strictly functional. It will be a massive amount to cover, but CNET will have a large team on the ground, including editors Jessica Dolcourt, Roger Cheng, Maggie Reardon, and Stephen Shankland. And thanks to CNET TV producers Jamie Yee and Mark Licea, the new handsets will get their star turns on video.

Android avalanche So what exactly will we see?… Read more

Intel's upcoming Ivy Bridge chip will be a big step up in graphics performance for Intel. And benchmark numbers suggest that you may want to wait for that new Ivy Bridge-based MacBook or Windows lappy before upgrading your system.

A Chinese-language Web site has posted benchmark numbers (reposted by CPU World) that show a jump in graphics processing unit (GPU) performance of up to 122 percent over the current Sandy Bridge processor.

"In 3DMark Vantage synthetic benchmarks Core i5-3570K (Ivy Bridge) achieved 88.9% higher GPU score when using Entry preset, and 122.1% better score with Performance preset … Read more

Smartphone maker HTC might go big at Mobile World Congress with a One X handset boasting quad-core horsepower.

Time is certainly ripe for HTC to wow the world with new cutting-edge mobile hardware. Its rivals, Motorola, Samsung, and Sony, have been hard at work churning out a number of fresh phones such as the Droid Razr Maxx, Droid 4, Galaxy Note, and Xperia S. It's enough for HTC devotees to wonder what the company is up to.

Looks like HTC fans won't have to wait long. Multiple gadget blogs such as Pocket-lint, Slashgear, and Pocketnow report that the … Read more

Nvidia is eying a market for inexpensive dual-core smartphones that underprice the iPhone 4S by a wide margin.

That phone segment, which the graphics chipmaker calls the "1,000 RMB phone" in China, will use Nvidia's dual-core Tegra 2 processor paired with a 3G modem, according to Chief Executive Officer Jen-Hsun Huang, who spoke during the earnings conference call this afternoon. RMB refers to the Chinese currency.

RMB 1,000 is about 75 percent less than the price of an iPhone 4S, which currently retails for RMB 4,988 in China.

"That's a pretty exciting … Read more

If you ask an average Android user to name the top smartphone brands in the United States, it's unlikely that Huawei would be an answer.

After releasing a string of entry-level and midrange devices across some of the smaller carriers, Huawei has been pushing steadily forward with high-end hardware. And with specs that rival the recent offerings out of HTC, Samsung, and Motorola, the company is positioning itself as a dark horse.

Take, for instance, the Ascend P1S, announced at CES earlier this year. At only 6.68mm thick, it somehow manages to sneak in a 1.5GHz dual-core … Read more

Will Apple's next iPad reach performance nirvana with a monster quad-core chip? Nirvana, maybe, but not necessarily via quad-core.

But let's put aside whether Apple's latest chip will be quad-core for a minute and look at what others are doing. (See a post at The Verge on this topic too.)

One of the leading lights among ARM processor suppliers is Texas Instruments. They've made it clear that they're not going quad-core this year and not even next year (necessarily) with their first next-gen OMAP5 chips.

In a CES demo, TI showed off the next-gen OMAP5 … Read more

RunCore introduced the Pro V Max solid-state drive (SSD) at CES 2012 as one of its first standard SSDs for the U.S. market.

However, the company is not a new SSD vendor. In fact it describes itself as a major vendor that has been offering SSD storage products for other OEM hardware vendors.

This might be the reason why it's priced the Pro V Max at about $2 per gigabyte, comparatively high, to avoid immediate competition with its partners.… Read more

A pair of unannounced LG smartphones are appearing online just four weeks before Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

The preliminary details were found in the UPnP Forum (1) (2), a popular spot for spying new devices before they come to market. Aside from the respective model numbers, there's not a ton of information to glean from the actual findings. PocketNow, however, has unearthed additional details.

After piecing together user agent profiles and model numbers, the LG-P700 will run Ice Cream Sandwich and feature a 640x480-pixel display. As that resolution does not fit the typical dimensions for Android handsets, … Read more