China’s ZTE to launch high-end Android or Windows phone in U.S.
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
If you’re familiar with ZTE in the U.S., then you’re familiar with low-cost or free phones from prepaid or contract carriers such as Boost Mobile, Cricket Wireless and MetroPCS, and from major carriers such as AT&T.
And you’d also know that ZTE’s phones are nowhere near challenging top-tier handsets such as the Apple iPhone, or Androids such as the Samsung Galaxy S II and the Motorola Droid Razr. Like HTC used to do, ZTE often makes products devoid of their own brand for carriers looking for entry-level devices.
But next year, the Chinese company is looking to change things up and launch a high-end smartphone in the U.S., according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
A high-end ZTE handset, running on speedy 4G LTE networks, could arrive toward the middle of next year and ‘by 2015, we expect the U.S. to be the largest market for handsets for ZTE,’ said Lixin Cheng, ZTE’s North American president, in a Hong Kong interview with the Journal.
Such a smartphone would offer iPhone-like features at a price still somewhat lower than Apple’s handset, Cheng told the Journal, declining to go into specifics about price.
The newest version of the iPhone, the iPhone 4S, starts at $199 for a unit with 16 gigabytes of built-in storage, increasing to $299 for 32 gigabytes and $399 for 64 gigabytes.
The idea may seem a bit far-fetched if you’ve never heard of ZTE before, but the company’s growth is very real. As noted by the Journal, ZTE grew to a 5% share of global cellphone shipments in the third quarter of the year.
That recent push propelled ZTE to pass Apple as the No. 4 shipper of cellphones (not just smartphones) in the world, according to the research firm Strategy Analytics. Aside from phones, ZTE also makes mobile hotspot and USB-wireless dongles for carriers such as T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon.
ZTE is ‘in talks’ with U.S. carriers about selling its high-end phones, which may run either Google’s Android operating system or Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 software, Cheng said in the report.
RELATED:
Motorola Droid Razr, from Verizon, review [Video]
Apple updates plans, renderings for new ‘spaceship’ campus
Samsung Galaxy Nexus: Still no U.S. release date, could sell for $299.99
-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+