SHENZHEN, CHINA—How much would you want to pay for a 1.4-GHz Android smartphone with a 4-inch, 854-by-480 screen, 8-megapixel camera, and the Gingerbread OS upgradeable to Ice Cream Sandwich? How about under $300 pre-paid?

Huawei and Cricket Wireless are bringing a potentially scorching combination of price and performance to the U.S. later this year with the Glory (Huawei M886), a high-quality smartphone with top-of-the-line specs.

Huawei is best-known right now for the , an inexpensive Android phone that's been a big hit at Cricket and MetroPCS. The two carriers have sold about two million Ascend phones between them, company execs told me here at Huawei's Shenzhen headquarters on Monday. The company started breaking out from cheap into classy with the U9000, a good-looking, announced at this year's CES.

The Ascend's selling point was price; the Glory, which is coming out with Cricket this November, also brings performance. Huawei let me handle a pre-production model to get an idea of its build and capabilities.

The Glory is yet another glossy bar-style smartphone. It has one interesting design touch: the back has a layer of clear plastic over a white base, giving it a sort of 3D look. The phone is smooth in the hand, and feels like it's made of quality plastic, with a glass screen. Although it's only 9.7mm thick, it doesn't feel very slim because of its squarish edges.

The TFT LCD screen is unusually bright. It actually bled light through the touch buttons at the bottom of the phone, a problem that Huawei said will be fixed in final units. But the bright screen also means it's viewable outdoors.

The Glory runs Android 2.3.3 on a 1.4-GHz Qualcomm MSM8655T processor. Huawei says this is a dual-core chipset, but Qualcomm's spec for the 8655T says that part is single-core; I'm still trying to work out what's really going on here. In any case, it's very, very fast. Huawei packed in an unusually large 1900 mAh battery to satisfy the demands of the high-end processor and bright screen.

Huawei has hacked Android somewhat, but fortunately not that much. There's a custom email widget. You can customize the home screen transitions to do things like rotate a 3D cube. There's a custom music player with colored backgrounds. You'll be able to rearrange the icons in the app drawer like you can on an iPhone. But the skin isn't nearly as heavy as, say, Samsung's TouchWiz.

The skin won't stop upgrades, either. As a late-2011 phone, Huawei told me, this will be upgradeable to Android 4.0, otherwise known as "Ice Cream Sandwich," in 2012.

Other specs: the Glory has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS (of course), along with an 8-megapixel, autofocus camera with LED flash, 2GB of memory along with a memory card slot, and oddly, EVDO Rev. B, although it will ship with Rev. A on Cricket in the U.S. market. One downer: there's no TV or HDMI out, though a Huawei rep told me they were working on a "surprising" media solution that wasn't ready to show yet.

Huawei wants to ship five million smartphones in the U.S. this year, and it plans to release half a dozen models. The Glory is expensive for a pre-paid phone, but if it works well, it could really raise Huawei's profile.

I'll have more reports from Shenzhen throughout the week, unless the jetlag gets to me.