Chinese Telecom giant, Huawei, has finally unveiled its new flagship smartphone and incidentally the first quad core smartphone on the market.

In the same vein as the iPhone 4 and 4S, Huawei has used its own application processor rather than silicon from either Texas Instruments, Nvidia or Qualcomm, all of which are incidentally US-based.

The Ascend D Quad will come in a white or black colour scheme and in a number of variants as well with different clock speeds, connectivity options and even different battery capacities.

At the heart of the Ascend D is the Huawei K3V2, which is a quad core powerhouse that comes with a 16-core GPU (which may be the first time Imagination Technology POWERVR SGX544MP2-16 has appeared in flesh).

It runs Ice Cream Sandwich, has a 4.5-inch 1280 x 720 pixel capacitive display with a 330ppi pixel density and uses IPS+ technology (no details as to whether it uses Corning Gorilla Glass).

Other features include a proprietary IPPS power management service, 5.1 surround sound with Dolby Mobile 3.0 Plus, dual microphone noise reduction with Audience earSmart technology which reduces background noise, an eight megapixel BSI rear-facing camera with AF, 1080p full HD video capture, a 1.3-megapixel front facing camera, 1GB RAM and 8GB onboard storage (no microSD card slot apparently).

The phone will come with an 1800mAh battery and a thickness of merely 8.9mm. Another version, the Ascend D Quad XL, will come with a 2500mAh battery while upping the thickness to only 10.9mm.

ITProPortal.com is live-blogging from Barcelona from Saturday evening, covering the pre-MWC 2012 events happening on Sunday and from Monday to Thursday, the event itself. You can follow our real-time running thread here.

Check the pictures of the Huawei Ascend D Quad below.