Huawei rumored to drop the “Ascend” name from all future smartphones

Chinese manufacturer Huawei will no longer use the name “Ascend” on its upcoming smartphones according to a new report coming straight from Italy. Unfortunately, we can’t confirm whether or not this is true at the moment so make you take it with a grain of salt. That said, HTC also seems to be dropping the “One” name from their upcoming flagships so it wouldn’t be all that strange to see Huawei doing something similar. The report also mentions that the follow-up to the Huawei Ascend P7 will probably launch sometime in the second quarter of the year under the name Huawei P8. By comparison, it’s predecessor first saw the light of day in June of 2014 and was made official shortly before that, in May.

According to several media outlets, the situation will be a bit different this year, with the next flagship expected to be announced as early as March during the MWC. Presumably, the now Ascend-less Huawei P8 will sport a 5.2-inch display with the same 1080 x 1920 resolution found on the company’s current flagship. The specs list should include the new in-house Kirin 930 processor complete with 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB of expandable internal storage memory, and a fingerprint scanner. The chassis of the Huawei P8 will allegedly be made out of metal as suggested by a couple of leaked images that surfaced back in December. The price tag is rumored to sit at around $490.

Aside from the P8, Huawei is expected to announce two more flagships at MWC in the form of the Mate8 and D8. The former is said to be the successor to the popular Huawei Mate 7, while the latter is looking to be the company’s most powerful smartphone yet and likely the main flagship for 2015. The Huawei D8 will reportedly come equipped with a 2K resolution 5.5-inch screen, 64-bit Kirin 950 CPU with 4 GB of RAM, and 64 GB of storage right off the bat. This device is believed to launch sometime during May for the price of $800.