Huawei releases Glory and Sonic, two cheap Android phones with high-end personalities

Some of you might know Huawei as the company that keeps making cheap (free) Android phones for people who upgrade from feature phones. But from this moment forward, you’ll know it as the company that sells really high-end Android phones at an amazingly low price.
The company has two Android phones in its pipeline that make some high-end ones cry in shame. The first one is the Huawei Sonic. Sadly, this one is not coming to the U.S.–at least not yet. Instead, Huawei is releasing it in Turkey for about $215 without a contract. The phone will launch the following specs:

• Android 2.3 Gingerbread (something a few OEMs haven’t figured out how to do here in the U.S. just yet)
• 3.5-inch HVGA screen
• 3.2 MP camera
• 256 of RAM
• 512MB of ROM

While this might look like your typical low-end Android phone, it has something many high-end ones don’t have: an NFC chip. That’s right. Huawei is the first OEM to launch a low-end Android phone with an NFC chip. (On a side note:  I don’t know which processor this phone is using, but judging from the video below, this thing is a speed demon).
While cheap a Android phone with NFC is all fine and dandy, cheap Android phones with high-end features is where the money’s at. That’s where the Huawei Glory comes in. Unlike the Sonic, the Glory is coming to the U.S. via Cricket Wireless. PCMag says the phone will launch with a price under $300 without a contract (which would be almost free with a contract).
With that kind of price, you’d expect this phone to be just slightly better than the Sonic. You’d be wrong. The Glory will launch with the following specs:

• Android 2.3 Gingerbread
• 1.4 GHz single-core Qualcomm MSM8655T processor
• 4-inch TFT screen with a 854×480 pixel resolution
• 8 MP rear-facing camera with LED flash and front-facing camera
• 2 GB of memory (the PCMag article doesn’t specify whether this is RAM or ROM memory)
• 1900 mAh battery

Yowza! That’s a pretty decent spec sheet for such a cheap phone. But that’s not all. Huawei topped it off by announcing the phone will be upgraded to Android 4.0 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich) when the update comes out. I guess this is the first official confirmation that Ice Cream Sandwich will carry the 4.0 number.
I have to say, a free Ice Cream Sandwich-powered phone with these specs doesn’t sound so bad. It sounds very good, in fact. I’ll take two. Do either of these phones change your opinion about Huawei? Let us know in the comments.

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