ZTE plans to unveil a range of “high-performance smartphones” in
Barcelona next week, including the Grand Memo II LTE with a 6-inch
screen, the follow-up to the 5.7-inch Grand Memo pictured above.
This year’s Mobile World Congress will be very important for the Chinese
company’s device unit, which is facing challenges. Last year, ZTE sold
59.9 million phones, down from 67.3 million in 2012, even as local
competitors such as Huawei Technologies and Lenovo increased their
sales, according to market research company Gartner. Although ZTE
shipped more phones than Huawei and Lenovo, these competitors sold more
smartphones.
The company needs to turn around its ailing fortunes, and Mobile World
Congress is the best place to start. Besides launching two new devices -
the Grand Memo II LTE and the Firefox OS-based ZTE Open C, it will also
introduce a new version of MiFavor, the user interface it adds on top
of Android, ZTE said Tuesday.
For now, the company isn’t announcing any details other than that the
Grand Memo II will have a 6-inch screen and the ZTE Open C will run
version 1.3 of Firefox OS, which will be launched in partnership with
Mozilla and Telefónica.
Smartphones with large screens will again be one of the key trends in
devices on display at Mobile World Congress. LG Electronics last week
announced the G Pro II, which runs Android 4.4, has a 5.9-inch Full HD
screen and is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor
clocked at 2.26 GHz.
That ZTE still likes Firefox OS is good news for the fledgling operating
system. Around 390,000 Firefox OS phones shipped last year, according
to IDC, a figure it expects to rise to 2.5 million this year. That will
give Firefox OS a 0.2 percent share of the total smartphone market, IDC
analyst Francisco Jeronimo recently said via email.
That isn’t very impressive, but is still better than competing new OSes
such as Tizen and Ubuntu, which aren’t even running on commercial phones
yet. However, for Firefox OS to become a serious contender, it needs
more brand awareness, wider distribution as well as products with
improved hardware and software, according to Neil Mawston, executive
director at Strategy Analytics.
This story, "ZTE teases 6-inch Android device and Firefox OS smartphone" was originally published by
IDG News Service
.
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