Huawei brings a “selfie king” to the mid-range in June

Taking selfies seems to be the thing at the moment. We’re probably not doing it enough, but if you are, you’re probably wishing the front facing camera on your phone was a little better, and that’s where a new phone from Huawei comes in.

Aimed at improving the quality of your selfies, Huawei will be unleashing its Ascend G6 on unsuspecting Australians, and even possibly some who are a little more suspecting.

The handset has been built from the same mould and design language as the P6, last year’s flagship for the company which boasted a softened rectangular body with metal sides and a thickness of 6.18 mm, with some high-end innards inside.

The Ascend G6 is a little different, switching out metal for plastic and increasing the thickness to 7.85mm. There’s a quad-core 1.2GHz processor from Qualcomm here, as well as 1GB RAM, 8GB storage, microSD slot for more, and a 4.5 inch qHD (960×540) IPS screen here, with Android 4.3 “Jelly Bean” running out of the box and the latest version of Huawei’s Emotion UI, which sort of acts as a halfway point between Apple’s iOS and Google Android.

An extra interface is also included called “Simple UI,” which brings a Windows Phone-like grid look to Android and aims to make everything easier to use, just for those who don’t need the complexity of Android.

Where Huawei hopes to grab people is the combination of the 4G Category 4 chip — which Vodafone can take advantage of in this country — and the two cameras, with an 8 megapixel camera on the back supporting f/2.0 on the aperture and a front-facing camera capable of shooting 5 megapixel images.

Five megapixel front-facing pictures means five megapixel selfies, and that’s something so few smartphone cameras have, which at the moment seem to include only the Huawei Ascend P6 and HTC’s One from 2014 (M8).

That could really grab the attention of people who love to grab a self portrait, which might include the party going public, but also anyone else tired of the one or two megapixel shooters sitting on the front.

As to pricing, we can only assume this one will sit in the mid-range because no one at Huawei would tell us what the going price for this phone will be, pointing us in the direction of Optus and Vodafone, which will both be selling the handset but as yet haven’t pointed out the price either. Instead, all we can tell you is June, because that’s when Optus and Vodafone will each have the Huawei Ascend G6.