Mozilla has given a preview of the initial devices to run the HTML5-based Firefox OS. The handsets include the ZTE Open plus the Alcatel OneTouch Fire. LG and Huawei will follow.

Making the announcement during a rambling and often chaotic event before the opening of MWC 2013, the initial devices will appear during Summer 2013.

Each will be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips.

The unique play of Firefox OS is that it enables every feature to be developed as if it were an HTML5 web app; eessentially the whole device is based on the same technology as the web. Mozilla hopes that developers will be attracted by the ease of developing for the device.

"There is no new ecosystem – if you're developing for the web today, you're already developing for Firefox OS," said Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's head of products.

When we were being demoed the product, the Mozilla lackey summed it up as "iOS is developed in Cupertino by a couple of thousand engineers. This can be written by anyone".

Clearly designed for developing markets, the first Firefox OS devices will be available to consumers in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela. Additional markets will be announced soon.

"Firefox OS brings the freedom and unbounded innovation of the open Web to mobile users everywhere," said Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla. Last year we shared the vision with you, this year we're going to share the devices." Kovacs welcomed Mozilla's partners warmly, saying "being version 1 is not easy."

Joining Kovacs on stage was Qualcomm's CEO Paul Jacobs: "HTML5 is fundamentally important. What we're trying to do here is fill the gaps so developers can get applications out, to help the developers build the applications that will run cross platform.

"We [Qualcomm] really see our role around the ecosystem as being an enabler. We have a huge amount of experience around testing and working with the operators and handset manufacturers. One thing we've really been able to do is tightly optimise the software, making sure the interface works extremely well as the telephony works well.

"We're targeting this for high volume smartphones, making sure it works right down....that incredible market for those people who haven't got a smartphone as yet.

"Mozilla is a group of people that believes we should be doing good for the web," continued Kovacs. We're on the edge of unlocking mobile."

"At the heart of Mozilla we are not driven by commercial profits. We are certainly not going to be alone. At the centre of a phone should be the web and the web is a level playing field. Any payment mechanism should work."

Developers can distribute their apps directly, but there is a Mozilla Marketplace. Mozilla says it wants to "tear down the walls" between apps and the web. Mozilla says it will be easy to "discover one-time use and downloadable apps."

To date, 17 key operators have committed to what Mozilla calls the open web device initiative: América Móvil, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Hutchison Three Group, KDDI, KT, MegaFon, Qtel, SingTel, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia Group, Telefónica, Telenor, TMN and VimpelCom.

Last year Huawei gave us the world's slimmest and the world's most powerful smartphones in the form of the Ascend P1 S and Ascend D Quad, and now the Huawei Ascend P2 has stolen the "world's fastest smartphone" crown.

In short, Huawei loves a good record breaker (which means it will absolutely love TechRadar), probably due to the fact it generates additional hype around its smartphone launches.

The Chinese firm is firmly setting its sights on the mid- and high-end of the mobile market as it tries to shake off the budget tag it's developed for itself over recent years.

It all started at CES 2013 when the Ascend D2 and huge Ascend Mate took centre stage, and the Ascend P2 now slides in below these two to fill that mid-range void in the line up.

The natural successor to the Ascend P1, the Ascend P2 release date is set for the second quarter of this year and it will cost €399 (around £345/$525/AU$510).

For the money you'll get a 4.7-inch 1280 x 720 display with 315 ppi, 1.5GHz quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, 13MP rear camera, 1.3MP front camera, Android Jelly Bean (version 4.1), 4G, NFC and a 2,420mAh battery.

Huawei has managed to cram all that tech into a relatively slender frame with the Ascend P2 measuring 136 x 67 x 8.4mm, and weighing a comfortable 122g.

The handset sits nicely in the hand, with the flat back and curved edges of the handset allowing you to grasp it properly, although the all plastic finish does detract a little from the smart, minimalist design.

It feels solid enough with the strength enhanced by the sealed chassis, meaning there's no access to the battery inside the handset.

This means you're left with a microSIM slot on the right hand side of the Ascend P2 which is covered by a simple to remove plastic flap, just below the easy to reach power/lock key.

From front on the Gorilla glass which covers the Ascend P2 extends over the top and bottom of the device, which apparently gives a similar effect to an infinity pool - at least that's according to Huawei's Head of Device, Richard Yu.

However you want to describe the Ascend P2, it's a tasteful design which is clean and professional and it looks like a handset you might actually want to own.

There's no full HD resolution on the 4.7-inch screen, as Huawei believes there's no point having anything more than 720p on displays less that 5-inches in size as the human eye can't distinguish the difference.

Not everyone is on Huawei's hymn sheet though as the HTC One, which sports the same size display as the Ascend P2, boasts a full HD screen.

The screen on the Ascend P2 is very good though - it's bright, colourful and well defined making the heavily customised Android Jelly Bean operating system look good.

In a similar fashion to Nokia and the Lumia 920, Huawei has equipped the Ascend P2 with what it's calling Magic Touch allowing you to use the handset whilst wearing gloves - an insanely useful feature we wish more smartphone manufacturers would implement.

Huawei has gone to town a little with its Emotion UI overlay, as it looks to give the Ascend P2 a different look and feel to the rest of the Android handsets on the market.

For example, it has completely removed the app draw from the P2 leaving you with just the homescreens to manage your apps from.

At first we found this pretty confusing as we kept wanting to press the app list key at the bottom of the screen, only to find it wasn't there - however after a short while we became accustomed to the fact we were stuck with just the homescreens.

Another unique feature is the ability to group a series of different sized widgets together into one larger widget, to provide a personalised homescreen experience and one that reminds us a little of the variably sized Live Tiles on Windows Phone 8.

The default icon design on the Emition UI does come across slightly childish, but the Ascend P2 has over 100 different themes for you to choose from, which changes the icons, wallpaper, widgets and colour scheme.

This means you can make the phone look quite a bit smarter without too much effort, but the pared down options may put the Android purists off.

You can easily manage your apps by dragging one on top of another to create a folder, and you'll find a variety of handy quick settings in the notification bar if you drag down from the top of the screen.

Moving around Android and jumping in and out of apps is generally pretty good, but the Huawei Ascend P2 lacks the zip of the Samsung Galaxy S3 and HTC One.

It's not a huge issue and it's certainly not so slow as to infuriate the user, but some applications did take two to three seconds to load up - the camera being one.

The Ascend P2 sports a dedicated camera key towards the bottom of its right side, which gives you the option to easily load up the app so you can quickly snap a picture.

Although the app may take a little time to load, the shutter button is far more responsive and we were able to snap pictures in quick succession without any hint of slow down.

Picture quality from the rear facing 13MP camera was very good, helped in part by the presence of auto- and tap-to-focus meaning we could avoid blurry messes most of the time.

During the launch event for the Ascend P2, Huawei claimed that it had equipped the hanset with a Super Resolution 2x digital zoom which would put an end to poor picture quality.

In practice this didn't quite seem to be the case with some pixelation occurring as we zoomed in, but it wasn't as much as we're used to seeing on smartphones.

If you like to play around with your photos there are a variety of camera effects and filters available in the app, along with modes such a panorama, HDR and low light. There's also a front facing 1.3MP camera, which is perfect for video calls or the odd vanity check.

Something Huawei is making a big song and dance about - and the reason it's dubbed the Ascend P2 "the world's fastest smartphone" - is its internet capabilities.

The Ascend P2 is the first smartphone to come equipped with CAT 4 LTE, meaning your able to access even faster 4G speeds - apparently maxing out at 150Mbps.

This is faster than the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S3 LTE, which both house the CAT 3 version of the technology.

Sadly we weren't able to put the Ascend P2 properly though its paces as the only internet connection available to us was an rather mediocre 3G network.

In terms of web browser you're provided with the perfectly functional Android default, although our surfing experience was distinctly average thanks to that 3G connection - look out for our full Huawei Ascend P2 review for the proper run down of how well the world's fastest smartphone fares on the web.

Web pages do look great though thanks to the 720p display, and the automatic text-reflow made reading out favourite TechRadar articles a breeze.

We watched the HD trailer for Rango on the phone and we're pleased to report that the movie looked fantastic on the Ascend P2 and we would happily watch a full length flick on this device.

Thanks to the quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM the Ascend P2 has enough grunt to run even the most taxing of games and Riptide ran smoothly during our play - though we felt the graphics weren't quite as good as handsets running Tegra 3 processors.

Huawei has also tweaked the onscreen keyboard and thankfully it's still a pretty decent offering with well spaced buttons and adequate auto correct and next word prediction making tapping out a message pretty easy.

Early Verdict

The Huawei Ascend P2 is a solid mid- to high-end smartphone with some decent features and pleasing array of specs.

It doesn't quite have the build quality of the iPhone 5 or HTC One, nor does it have the same snappiness as the excellent Galaxy S3 and the Emotion UI may not be every Android fan's cup of tea.

That said it will give the likes of the HTC One S, BlackBerry Z10 and Nokia Lumia 820 a right old run for their money and we look forward to putting the Ascend P2 through its paces in our in-depth review.

During its keynote speech at MWC 2013 Huawei admitted it hasn't had an easy ride in the smartphone market.

Huawei Device's Global Brand Director, Amy Lou took to the stage and explained the Chinese firm has had it tough over the past few years, but it's now looking to kick on.

Lou said: " It's been difficult to shift from an ODM white label brand to a Huawei brand, and it's been difficult to shift our focus from feature to smartphones."

Make it possible

The Chinese firm, currently the third largest smartphone provider in the world, has big ambitions which goes some way to explaining it's new mantra "make it possible."

"We're an ambitious young brand which plans to be one of the top 100 companies in the world in the coming years", explained Lou.

For Huawei to break into the top 100 it needs to bring powerful flagship devices to market, which it has started to do with the Ascend D2 and Ascend Mate launching at CES 2013, followed by the Ascend P2 at MWC 2013.

Can these handsets help propel Huawei to challenge the likes of Samsung and Apple? Only time will tell, but the big guns of the smartphone world will need to keep tabs on this Chinese revolution.

The Huawei Ascend P2 has been unveiled as the worlds fastest 4G smartphone at MWC 2013 in Barcelona, replacing the Ascend P1 in the Chinese firm's line up.

It's the first smartphone to pack in LTE CAT 4, which Hauwei claims will allow the Ascend P2 to deliver some blistering web browsing speeds, faster than the CAT 3 toting Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE and iPhone 5.

There's also high-speed Wi-Fi for when you want to surf the web at home, with the Ascend P2 offering speeds of up to 520Kbps.

On your marks...

The Ascend P2 also packs in a 4.7-inch display with a 315ppi resolution, 1.5GHz quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, 13MP camera, NFC technology and 2,420mAh battery into a plastic case which is 8.4mm at its thickest point.

Huawei CEO Richard Yu said it could have made the Ascend P2 even thinner, but it would have had to sacrifice the quality of the camera to make this possible.

If you've taken a fancy to the Huawei Ascend P2 you'll be pleased to learn that the handset will launch globally in the second quater of this year and will retail for €399 (around £345/$525/AU$510).

Apple has a reputation for perfectionism, for ensuring every last detail is absolutely right before presenting their latest "magical, wonderful" system, software or service to a waiting world.

And that's perfectly true... sometimes.

But Apple is made of people, and people screw up - sometimes because they make mistakes, sometimes because there are too few people under too much pressure, and sometimes because the technology isn't quite ready for what Apple's trying to do.

Here are some of Apple's most interesting failures.

1. Newton

[Image credit: Blake Patterson, Wikimedia Commons CC BY 2.0]

The Newton was the iPad two decades before the iPad: an ultra-portable, incredibly useful new gadget that users absolutely loved. Steve Jobs didn't agree, and canned it in 1997. Apple may have invented the PDA (CEO John Sculley coined the term in 1992), but it hadn't perfected it: the handwriting recognition was the subject of a Simpsons spoof and a Doonesbury strip, and it seemed that people simply didn't get the Newton: where Apple hoped to sell millions of Newtons, reports suggest that it only shifted 50,000 in its first three months. By comparison, in 2012 Apple sold three million iPads in three days.

As Harry McCracken wrote in Time magazine, the problem was that Apple was simply ahead of its time: "When Jobs decided to shut down the Newton division, color screens were still unaffordable, touch input was crude and wireless data didn't get much more exciting than two-way paging. When he launched the first iPhone nine years later, technology allowed Apple to build the sort of devices it wanted to create in the 1990s, but couldn't."

2. MobileMe

The service formerly known as iTools, then .Mac, was an online software suite that would seamlessly blend desktop and web-based software and services. It didn't quite work out that way. Its 2008 relaunch was bumpy, with problematic syncing, email problems and other issues, and in 2008 Jobs admitted in an internal email that the launch was rushed and was "not up to Apple's standards". More colourfully, he apparently asked the MobileMe team what the service was supposed to do - and when they replied, he yelled "so why the f--- doesn't it do that?"

3. Pippin

[Image credit: AllAboutApple.com, CC BY-SA 2.5 IT]

Apple never planned to manufacture its games console: the Pippin was a scaled-down Mac, a games platform and networked computer, that Apple intended to license for others to make. Bandai was the main licensee, but sales were disappointing: it predicted 300,000 sales in the first year, but only made 100,000 - and of those, it only sold 42,000. That was partly because Apple didn't market it: that was the licensees' job, and they were up against Sony and Sega.

4. Lisa

The 1983 Apple Lisa was a technological triumph, the first personal computer with a Graphical User Interface and an absolutely terrifying price tag. An unfortunate intervention from Steve Jobs, who had been exiled from the Lisa project, didn't help. As affordable IBM PCs started to dominate business computing, the Lisa cost nearly $10,000 and was immediately depth-charged by Steve Jobs' announcement that a better, incompatible system was imminent. That computer was the Mac, and its 1984 release killed off the Lisa for good.

5. iOS 6 Maps

One of Apple's biggest disasters is also its most recent - although the rest of our list should give the lie to the oft-repeated belief that Apple never messed up when Steve Jobs was still around. Last year's iOS Maps debacle got the interface right and the data hopelessly wrong, and it still isn't up to scratch. The New York Times said it "may be the most embarrassing, least usable piece of software Apple has ever unleashed."

6. iPod Shuffle (3rd Generation)

Steve Jobs famously hated buttons, so what could be better than an iPod with no buttons at all? The answer turned out to be "an iPod with buttons on it". The 2009, third generation iPod Shuffle moved everything to the remote control and encouraged you to use VoiceOver, but it turned out that consumers quite like clicking things and feel stupid shouting at their gadgets. The fourth generation Shuffle got its buttons back.

7. G4 Cube

The 2000 G4 Cube is arguably one of the prettiest computers ever made, but it cost a lot ($1,599) and suffered from cracks in its transparent surface. Apple chose form over function, designing a beautiful and near-silent Mac that looked rather underpowered compared to rivals: while typical PC processors were clocking in at 1GHz, the G4 Cube's fastest processor was a 500MHz model.

8. Hockey puck mouse

Your RSI-addled, post-hand-surgery correspondent finds all Apple mice horrid, but the hockey puck mouse was particularly unpleasant: the mouse, which shipped with the iMac in 1998, was small, stylish and for many, absolutely useless. It rotated easily and was too small for some. Apple replaced it two years later with the considerably more comfortable Pro Mouse.

9. 20th Anniversary Mac

Like many Apple disasters the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh wasn't a product failure, but a marketing one: when it launched in 1997 it cost a staggering $7,499 - but the price was cut again and again, dropping to just $1,995 in early 1998. Remember how upset early iPhone purchasers were when the price dropped by $200? Early Twentieth Anniversary Mac purchasers watched their computers lose over five grand.

10. iPod Hi-Fi

When Steve Jobs showed off the iPod Hi-Fi in early 2006, the world went "meh". It was expensive, of course - more expensive than premium products from the likes of Bose - as well as enormous. It looked odd, didn't support every iPod, and didn't really have a reason to exist. Apple quietly shot it in the head in late 2007, wisely deciding to leave the iPod accessory market to third parties.

Samsung's long-rumoured Galaxy Note 8.0 has been officially announced ahead of the opening of MWC 2013.

Samsung confirmed the device after an anonymous tipster, presumably part of the set-up crew in Barcelona, snapped a picture of the Samsung stand. There, lo and behold, was the Galaxy Note 8.0 featured on the big screen.

It's big differentiation from the competition is obviously the 'power' of the S Pen, which brings in all manner of Air View and handwriting / formula / shape recognition to the mix. However, while the Notw 8.0 looks a lot like the Note 2 in terms of spec, other features have been added such as a dedicated e-book reading mode that adjusts the contrast and resolution to save reader eyesight.

The latest leak comes just a week after the Note 8.0 was accidentally revealed at a Samsung event in South Korea - but the official press release does confirm that we'll be getting both Wi-Fi and 3G versions of the tablet, although it doesn't look like 4G is included in that mix.

Top billing

The new, iPad mini-bothering member of the Note family will pack an 8-inch 1280 x 800 Super Clear LCD display, Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean, a 1.6GHz ARM-quad-core processor and 2GB RAM.

There's also a 5MP camera, a 2MP front-facing sensor, plus up to 32GB internal storage and the chance for much, much more though the microSD slot. And if you're worried about longevity per charge, the 4600mAh battery will probably do you for a couple of days at least.

The display isn't as clear as some of the competition, simply by the fact it has a larger screen - you can see that Samsung is less worried about the Nexus Fires of this world and once again going after its old nemesis Apple with the larger screen.

However, we don't have that one bit of crucial information: price. The Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 release date has been set for Q2 2013 (in the UK, at least) but if it follows other Samsung tablets and costs a rather high amount it won't have a prayer against the incumbent budget brigade, despite the reams of S Pen magic you can do.

We already know that the Samsung Galaxy S4 won't be making an appearance at the event this year, with latest speculation suggesting it will arrive at a dedicated event on March 14.

Samsung's long-rumoured Galaxy Note 8.0 has been officially announced ahead of the opening of Mobile World Congress.

Samsung confirmed the device after an anonymous tipster, presumably part of the set-up crew in Barcelona, snapped a picture of the Samsung stand. There, lo and behold, was the Galaxy Note 8.0 featured on the big screen.

Naturally, the device looks absolutely gigantic, but it seems Samsung is still intent on us using it in portrait mode with one-hand, although that could be a bit of a stretch for anyone who's not named LeBron James.

The latest leak comes just a week after the Note 8.0 was accidentally revealed at a Samsung event in South Korea.

Top billing

The new, iPad mini-bothering member of the Note family will pack an 8-inch 1280 x 800 Super Clear LCD display, Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean, a 1.6GHz ARM-quad-core processor and 2GB RAM.

The placement of the Galaxy Note 8.0 promotional screen, in the centre of the Samsung stand, suggests that it'll probably be the Korean giant's top announcement at MWC 2013.

We already know that the Samsung Galaxy S4 won't be making an appearance at the event this year, with latest speculation suggesting it will arrive at a dedicated event on March 14.