Huawei Ascend W1, the cheapest Windows Phone ever?

As one of the launching OEM partners of Microsoft, Huawei is terribly late with their Windows Phone products. It took them awful lot of time to bring Ascend W1 to the market. The device is barely unique by any means so far. But if the picture above is to be trusted, things might start to turn in Huawei's favor.

A guy on Sina weibo ("China's Twitter") took this snapshot on a phone sales fair organized by China Telecom. The price tag says CNY 1,599, which translates into US$ 258. That is the "asking price" from Huawei itself though. In the hands of distributors and resellers, the price will very likely be even lower. So, Ascend might be the cheapest Windows Phone 8 device available in the market thus far. Competition be praised.

According to Chinese tech site WPDang, Huawei apparently asked its factories to manufacturer 500 thousand units of Ascend W1 for the first batch. Let's see if that persuasive price could do magic.

Source: Sina Weibo, WPDang

Kane Gao