Earlier in the year, rumors were placing the Huawei Ascend W1 Windows Phone 8 handset’s arrival as sometime around November or December. Not only is that not happening, but Huawei still hasn’t even formally unveiled the W1 yet. Right now, the plan is for Huawei to finally get around to the W1′s public debut at the CES in January, but what then? New rumors suggest that the smartphone could be seeing a European launch sometime in Q1 2013, possibly in March.

These rumors specifically deal with the Ascend W1′s retail availability in Italy, but the rest of Europe is likely to get the phone around the same time window.

We’ve already heard a little about rumors for the phone to come to Greece, when it was rumored that the phone would have an exceptionally low price tag, possibly even below 200 euros. This Italian rumor doesn’t go quite so low, but it does mention a price under 300 euros ($389). Between the two, there’s a lot of wiggle room, and the W1′s success when it finally does arrive may hinge on its ability to be sold for closer to the bottom of that spectrum.

The W1 will have a 4.3-inch WVGA display, a five-megapixel main camera, and run a 1.2GHz dual-core SoC.

Source: Windows Phone Italy (Google Translate)
Via: WPCentral