At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in the US, Huawei unveiled a Windows smartphone called the Huawei Ascend W1. The phone has a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB internal storage and a 5MB pixel camera. In short, low to mid-range brain & power. Today, the two companies announced a slight and gave it made for a Africa tag. It’s actually called exactly that; Huawei 4Afrika.

A U.S congressional investigation concluded that the two Chinese telecommunications giants, Huawei Technologies Inc., and  ZTE Inc pose potential risks to their national security. The US’s worries come from the fact that the two entities receive significant funding directly from the Chinese government. The two tech firms have experienced growth, rapidly expanding worldwide especially in emerging markets, Zimbabwe [...]

Last week, we visited the Huawei Mobile broadband show that ran from 22nd to 29 February in Harare. The show was held for telecommunication services providers in Zimbabwe and it was meant as a neutral platform for Huawei to showcase its product, both end user consumer products and backend infrastructure products.

Good news like this press release travels fast. No sooner had it been published than Zimguardian picked it up and repeated the PR. It’s said if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. Eventually a big local daily newspaper, the NewsDay, picked the lie and amplified it yesterday. But in these connected times we live in there’s high risk repeating a lie; someone will eventually call you out on it.

Yesterday, a Bulawayo state owned publication, the Chronicle, carried an article about the state owned fixed line operator, TelOne. According to the article, an infrastructure upgrade exercise is underway at TelOne as part of a multi-million dollar deal with Huawei International and Alcatel Lucent. The first phase will be complete this month, the article says, and when all work has been completed, TelOne will have a subscriber capacity of at least a million subscribers.

After we announced the launch of Huawei’s Ideos S7 Tablet in South Africa a few months ago and the company’s stated intentions to conquer Africa with affordable Android devices, Econet Wireless has come out with a double punch. The company has introduced the Huawei Ideos S7 tablet and the Ideos Google phone at $450 and $165 respectively.

Huawei, China’s ICT giant recently launched its Ideos S7 Tablet PC to the South African market. Huawei is well known as a telecoms infrastructure and enterprise hardware producer and has been moving into the consumer segment in recent years. Along with ZTE, the company is among a crop of Chinese brands that have gained ground internationally and intends to build on this while aggressively competing on pricing.

Today, Econet launched a new contract (post-paid) package for mobile subscribers where, if a customer has a minimum salary of US $250, they can get a free mobile phone on contract. We contacted Econet for details of new mobile plan and got some interesting facts you’ll want consider if you’re thinking of getting yourself a contract ‘free’ mobile phone.

Econet, the largest mobile operator in Zimbabwe, has started selling Android smartphones at its new concept shops in Harare. So far only the Huawei U8220 mobile phone is available. We visited the Livingstone Avenue Econet shop last week and had a feel of the phone.

Today, news came out that Aquiva Wireless has sealed a telecoms deal worth US $7.2m with Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei Technologies. The deal itself is for the establishment of 92 bases stations for broadband Internet. This effectively sets Aquiva Wireless on a growth path to compete with Internet Access Providers that have extensive infrastructure in the country like Africom, Ecoweb, PowerTel, Telecontract and TelOne.

In this week’s edition of the prime minister’s newsletter (available for download on the PM site) the information communication technology minister Nelson Chamisa says he had “specific discussions and arrangements” with large communication giants like Nokia and Huwaei at last week’s last week’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) summit in Geneva. Unfortunately we won’t know the [...]