A look at Huawei 4Africa Windows 8 smartphone

Mobile users in the Kenyan market now have an alternative smartphone, courtesy of a partnership between Microsoft and Huawei.

The Huawei 4Africa is specifically designed for the African market and runs on the latest operating system from Microsoft — Windows 8 OS.

One of the first impressions of the gadget is a clear 4-inch display, similar to the size of the latest iPhone.

The Windows 8 platform makes the gadget shine, with a screen covered with live tiles or apps. The physical design mimics Nokia’s high-end Lumia series of phones, with the gadget adopting a block shape and being available in an array of bold colours.

Huawei is marketing the gadget as a value phone, meaning that it is customised to be affordable. The phone is a smart and stylish alternative for users interested in exploring the marvels of Windows 8 at a reasonably affordable price.

The Huawei 4Afrika is a customised version of the Huawei Ascend W1, launched earlier this year at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show. The smartphone is slim and features a 4-inch IPS LCD 480x800 capacitive touch display which is modelled on zero-gap touch technology.

It has a 1730mAh Li-Polymer battery which is designed to provide up to 420 hours of standby time and up to 560 minutes of talk time on 3G.  The higher efficiency hardware design ensures power-saving up to 20 per cent, according to Huawei. It is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core 1.2 GHz processor and Adreno 305 GPU.

Additionally, the phone has a 5MP auto-focus camera at the back and a VGA front camera. The gadget has an internal storage memory of 4GB and provision of expanding the storage space with the use of a microSD card up to 32GB. Given that it is running on Windows 8, there is extra provision of storage in Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud computing service.  

As a game changer, the smartphone stands out in a plethora of low-end phones with the latest operating system from Microsoft. The Huawei 4Africa phone is exclusively designed for the Kenyan market and Africa at large, making it the first low-end customised Windows 8 smartphone in the region.

The phone also comes pre-loaded with custom apps created by African developers for African consumers and features a market-specific store within the larger Windows Phone Store for downloading locally-relevant apps and content.
This is quite encouraging, given the potential of the mobile market on the African continent. However, the tricky part is that the market is awash with several models of low-end smartphones, with most running on the Android platform.

Competition

The Huawei 4Africa smartphone faces stiff completion from an array of low-end and mid range smartphones on the Kenya and African market at large.

In the Windows phone category, for instance, the gadget will battle for market share with the Nokia Lumia range. There are other variants of windows phones from China which have so far been over-shadowed by the Android platform.

Generally, the biggest challenge to Widows-based phones in emerging markets like Africa is poised by the meteoric rise of the Android software and proliferation of associated cheap devices. Most of the low-end smartphones run on Android, and the market trend for the Androids has been favourable.  

The gradual rise of the Android operating system now pits devices like the Huawei 4Africa against a plethora of Androids in mid-range and low-end smartphone categories.

As a matter of fact, the contributions by device-makers like Huawei will help grow the Windows phone foot-print in Kenya.

The writer is an ICT analyst and a telecommunication engineer.