At a media event in London, Huawei launched what could establish its brand into the big league of premium smartphones, a hard-earned feat. The new Ascend P6 from Huawei challenges the best of the best -- HTC One, Apple iPhone 5, Galaxy S 4 (forget we mentioned that), and Xperia Z. It stakes claim to being the thinnest 4.5- to 5-inch segment device, with a uniform thickness of just 6.18 mm (the iPhone 5 is 7.6 thick). The rest of the device is shaped in a non-pretentious cuboid, with round edges. The phone isn't trying to hide its real thickness with any design trickery. Most panels of the Ascend P6 are metal, with a flat Gorilla Glass decking up the front. The phone is available in three trims, black, silver, and soft-pink.

　　The Ascend P6 from Huawei features a 4.7-inch screen, with 720 x 1280 pixels resolution (312 ppi density). A micro-USB connector decks its top, 3.5 mm audio jack on its bottom, power and volume-rocker on its right-side. Its top-left oriented primary camera features an 8-megapixel BSI CMOS sensor, F/2.0 lens, and 40 mm macro. Interestingly, the secondary (front-facing) camera isn't some low-brow sub-2 megapixel fare. Huawei loaded it with a 5-megapixel front camera, which is capable of 720p video capture.

　　Under the hood, you get Huawei's very own HiSilicon K3V2 SoC at the helm of things. This chip combines a quad-core Cortex-A9 CPU clocked at 1.50 GHz, with a 16-core GPU, and a soft-modem that's capable of HSPA+ (21.1 Mbps), 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 4.0. Sadly, the LTE-capable version won't be here until much later this year (Q4). Dual-SIM versions, however, are. The SoC is backed by 2 GB of RAM, and 8 GB of internal storage that's expandable with micro-SDHC (by up to 32 GB). Huawei deployed Android 4.2.2 with its Emotion 1.6 user-interface. A 2,000 mAh battery powers the device, which is generous, considering its dimensions of 132.7 x 65.5 x 6.2 mm, and 120 g weight.

　　Contract-free, Huawei Ascend P6 should make your wallet lighter by about 450€, when it hits Europe in July. Most popular European carriers should offer the device under contracts.