Huawei Mulan flagship and new Honor leak

A couple of new yet unannounced Huawei smartphones have hit the rumor mill today. We got photos and some key specs of the Chinese company's upcoming flagship codenamed Mulan as well as press renders of a new member of the Honor series.

The leaked Huawei Mulan photos show its sides and suggest a design similar to the Ascend P1 and a very slim profile. They also confirm a side-mounted microUSB port as well as the lack of a dedicated camera key.

More interestingly, we get a couple of screenshots from a recent trip Mulan took to the AnTuTu benchmark. Those confirm a 1080p screen and a home-baked Hisilicon Kirin 920 chipset with a 1.3GHz octa-core CPU, a potent Mali-T624 GPU and 3GB of RAM.

The primary camera is listed to have a 13MP sensor and 4K video recording capabilities, while the front-facing snapper does 5MP stills and 1080p video. The Mulan runs on Android 4.4.2 KitKat and has 16GB of built-in storage (no confirmation on whether that's expandable though).

Review: Huawei Ascend P7

Huawei talked it up big time at the launch event for the Ascend P7, suggesting its newest phone is a premium model that's lighter, thinner, faster, better and more exciting than the thin/light/fast/good high-end smartphones offered by the more established competition.

It's certainly an expensive one from the budget maker, coming with an EU RRP of €449 (around £370, $625, AU$690).

Actual contract costs and a UK, US and Australia street prices are yet to be set for the P7, but that relatively high official unlocked price tag sets up Huawei for a fight with the likes of Apple, HTC, Samsung and Sony for the flagship smartphone connoisseur cash.

Huawei's offering a 5-inch display running at the full HD resolution of 1080 x 1920, with the in-house (not-Qualcomm) 1.8GHz quad-core processor running things down in the boiler room beside the same 2GB of RAM we see in most of today's top-drawer smartphones - and 4G LTE support for use with speedy SIMs.

Huawei's been pretty bold with its Android customisations once again, sticking its Emotion UI on top of the Ascend P7's Android 4.4.2 KitKat software, a system that removes the standard Android app drawer and replaces it with an iOS-style emphasis on the Home screen.

Octa-core Huawei Kirin 920 chipset goes official

Huawei announced today its next generation chipset - the Kirin 920. It is based on ARM's big.LITTLE architecture and uses four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 cores capable of working simultaneously.

The Cortex-A15 cores can be clocked from 1.7GHz up to 2.0GHz, while the energy-efficient Cortex-A7 ones start at 1.3GHz and can be boosted up to 1.6GHz.The Kirin 920 relies on the powerful Mali-T628MP4 quad-core graphics. We've seen the same GPU, but with six cores (MP6), to perform in the octa-core models of the Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy S5.

Another key features of the new chipset are the LTE Category 6 support, Tensilica HIFI3 professional audio processor, 4K video recording and QHD display support.

According to Huawei's presentation the Kirin 920 outperforms the entire current crop of flagship chipsets including Snapdragon 801, Exynos 5420 and MediaTek MT6592. The company even claims its SoC can outdo the upcoming Snapdragon 805, expected to power the

The first device expected to utilize the Kirin 920 is the leaked Huawei codenamed Mulan flagship with a 1080p display, 3GB of RAM and a 13MP snapper with 4K video recording.