Huawei Ascend P7: 1080p, Android KitKat, super-thin smartphone

Huawei is the third-largest smartphone maker in the world, doing brisk business in Japan and Europe, and to a lesser degree in the United States. It wants to increase that ranking and hope that their latest product is enough to corner the US market. With the launch of the Hauwei Ascend P7, it has a hot product on its hands to help reach that goal. Announced Wednesday morning in Paris, the P7 ships with Android 4.4 KitKat and is an impressive piece of equipment. It competes with the other big name brands for system specs, boasting a 5-inch 1920 x 1080 display, LTE network capability, a 1.8GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, 13-megapixel rear camera, and 16GB of storage. Seriously, this things blows my last computer out of the water and is giving my new one a run for its money. At 6.5mm in thickness, it's considerably slimmer too.

That isn't the feature that Huawei considers the selling point though. No, they are basing their marketing strategy on the selfie. See, the 13-megapixel camera I mentioned? Again, that's the rear facing one. The front-facing shooter is packing 8-megapixels of its ownl, and carries 5 independent lenses. Remember, this is the secondary camera--and that's a feature thaty many might find good enough to seriously consider the P7. Huawei representatives say that the market demands better self portraits.

This is a pretty significant over the 1.2 and 2 megapixels in the iPhone 5s and the Galaxy S5 respectively, and for a photographer it is certainly tempting. But Huawei is competing with well-sstablished American markets, and preconceptions about Chinese quality. And it's doing it with a $625 price tag.

It's expensive, but for the system specs it's still impressive. Enough to make this bitter patriot start reconsidering that 'Made in China' label. With next gen phones hitting the market, the smartphone arena is about to become a crucible.

Let the games begin.