Chinese giant Huawei took the wraps off a new high-spec Android smartphone in Barcelona yesterday, touting the new Ascend P2 as the “fastest smartphone ever.”

The device is a successor to the Ascend P1 that was launched at CES last year. It boasts a 4.7-inch display, 1.5 GHz quad-core processor and runs the latest Android 4.1 ‘Jelly Bean’ software.  It has 13-megapixel and 1.3-megapixel cameras back and front respectively. It will launch worldwide in Q2

Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei’s Consumer Business unit, told reporters that the P2’s category 4 LTE radio was able to support download speeds of 150Mb/s, claiming this made it considerably faster than rival devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S3 and Apple iPhone.

According to recent figures from Gartner, Huawei is now the world’s third-largest smartphone maker behind Samsung and Apple.

Yu said that in 2012, out of 52 million handsets shipped by Huawei, 32 million were smartphones, representing a 60 per cent year-on-year increase. Annual sales at the unit were up 10 per cent to $7.5 billion.

Huawei is also using Congress this year to launch a global brand campaign based on its new ‘Make it possible’ slogan.

The firm’s branding director Amy Lou described the new concept as the start of a push to establish Huawei as “a great consumer brand” and a “visionary challenger.”

“It has not been an easy shift from an OEM to our own branded phones; from the low-end to the high-end,” she admitted. The goal is to make Huwaei one of the world’s top 100 most recognisable brands in “the coming years.”

The campaign will be rolled-out in selected markets around the world throughout the year, and will feature “retail experiences, online activities, and media engagement.”