By Star Chang, posted Jan 8, 2013 at 1:56 AM, 1,360 views,

CES 2013: Huawei Unveils 6.1-inch Ascend Mate Smartphone, Dwarfs Apple iPhone (Video)

[UPDATE] Huawei unveiled the 6.1-inch Ascend Mate smartphone (phablet) at CES in Las Vegas today. The Huawei Ascend Mate features a ginormous 6.1-inch 1280 x 720 touchscreen display, making it the largest smartphone in size on the market today. It also has a 241ppi pixel density and arrives complete with “Magic Touch” technology, which means that you can use the phone while wearing non-touchscreen gloves. Taking tips from its Galaxy Note rival, the Huawei Ascend Mate also comes with multitasking support, which means that you can watch a video while typing an email in a “Floating Window” …

The Ascend Mate boasts Google’s Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system with Huawei’s customisable Emotion user interface skin. It is powered by a 1.5GHz quad-core processor, 2GB RAM and features a dual WiFi receiver for speeds up to 150Mbit/s and a whopping 4,050mAh battery, which will last for 22 hours of constant talk time. The radio runs on UMTS 850/900/1700/1900/2100 MHz, no 4G LTE. Other specification we have an 8-megapixel camera, 1MP front-facing camera, and a microSD card slot. There is only 768MB of RAM inside the handset, which too is a little surprising as everybody nowadays are expecting at least 1GB ( Editor note: the folks over at techradar properly have made a mistake on the amount of RAM …). A nifty software tweak for the handset is its “One-hand” user interface, which sees the keyboard and dialpad shrinked down so they can be used with just one hand.

The Huawei Ascend Mate will make its debut in China next month, with a global rollout to start in March. There’s no word on pricing yet. The line between smartphone and tablet continues to blur. Huawei wants us to ditch our tablet in favour of the Ascend Mate, which in its eyes can double as both a slate and a phone. Not every casual consumers will get into this philosophy. A 6.1-inch phone is pretty gigantic – verging on unnecessary. The Ascend Mate is no small device – it measures 163.5 mm x 85.7 mm x 9.9 mm and weighs 198g.

Hands on Round-up :

(1) GIZMODO (2) engadget (3) GSMArena
(4) techradar (5) PCMAG (6) Pocket-lint

See what else happened this year at CES 2013.

SOURCE: SINA Tech (Chinese content)