Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is rumoured to be working on a new smartphone with a record-breaking diagonal display. The Ascend Mate is said to have a display of 6.1in, bigger than the 5.5in of the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and not far from the 7in diagonal that’s common on most small form factor tablets.

The Ascend Mate, whose specs have leaked on Chinese website MyDrivers, is said to be a mere 10mm thick with a monstrous 6.1in 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, 2GB of RAM, a 4000mAh battery, a HiSilicon K3V3 quad-core system-on-chip clocked at 1.8GHz, the same that powers the Ascend D1 Quad that we saw eight months ago at MWC in Barcelona.

The Ascend Mate is likely to be big and unless Huawei came up with an ultra-thin bezel, it may well be too big for most hands. But then, as our own James Laird pointed out, big smartphones appear to be pretty popular in South East Asia which appears to be the main market for phablets.

Although some suggest that Samsung was the company which launched the phablet phenomenon, one must not forget that Dell, with its Streak smartphone, was in fact the first to introduce a pocketable 5in smartphone. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a commercial disaster, which ultimately forced Dell to retreat from the tablet and smartphone markets.