We’ve just come out of a rather crowded ZTE Press Room where they’ve announced several new devices. Just yesterday we saw yesterday how HTC have switched gear – focusing more on quality products rather than trying to hit every segment in the market. ZTE are doing the polar opposite. They’re positively carpet-bombing everyone, with Android devices, Windows Phone devices and several form factors. The eyes of reporters almost glazed over as phone after phone after phone got announced today. Tablets too.
They’ve got high hopes and are really pushing hard across every market and consumer type. Mr. He Shiyou, Executive Vice President and Head of the Terminals Division at ZTE said that..
The numbers speak for themselves. With 50 percent growth in handset shipments and 400 percent growth in smartphone shipments, we are confident that we are entering a new era in the mobile terminal market.
Today they announced a range or devices but first up, the ZTE Era. It’s a high-spec phone measuing in at just 7.8mm and has an NVIDIA quad-core 1.3GHz CPU. It packs a 4.3 QHD (960×540) screen and has 8GB of memory which you can expand with the microSD card slot. There’s a 8 megapixel camera at the back, another up front and will arrive here in Europe in the second half of 2012. Other specs include HD Voice (this could easily head to Orange), Dolby sound, DLNA, FM radio, WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0, GPS and it’s all powered by Android 4.0.
ZTE are also keen to add their own stamp on handsets and there’s now a ZTE UI called “MiFavor”. ZTE say that they’ve completely re-designed and re-engineered the user experience here, trying to reduce the amount of fiddling people need to do to just to make things work. There’s widgets – we saw a music player and weather widget, and you can group together regularly-used items in a favourites widget. Here it is in action..
We’ll get a hands-on with this later, but until then here’s some shots and the full press release.
TE heralds new smartphone Era with high spec, 7.8mm thin quad-core device
ZTE Era smartphone launched at Mobile World Congress 201227 February 2012, Shenzhen – ZTE Corporation (“ZTE”) (H share stock code: 0763.HK / A share stock code: 000063.SZ), a leading global provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions, has announced the ZTE Era, one of the thinnest quad-core devices on the market today.
Based on the NVIDIA® Tegra® 3 quad-core mobile processor and equipped with a NVIDIA Icera 450 HSPA+ modem, the ZTE Era packs high definition multimedia capabilities into a package that is just 7.8mm thick. The Era has a 4.3 inch QHD screen giving high quality 960 x 540 pixel images, 8GB of memory expandable with a MicroSD card, HD voice and Dolby sound. Running the latest Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) platform the ZTE Era is the most powerful Android smartphone from ZTE, providing powerful new ways of communicating and sharing, with easy multitasking, rich notifications and deep interactivity. The ZTE Era delivers a great combination of amazing battery life and outstanding performance with Tegra 3’s unique 4-PLUS-1™ quad-core architecture with a fifth battery saver core.
The ZTE Era is the flagship device launch from ZTE at Mobile World Congress and is part of a series of eight new devices unveiled at the event, all delivering significant advances in power, high definition multimedia capabilities and design. Based on technology innovations including quad-core chipsets, LTE and the latest Android and Windows Phone platforms, the new devices form a core component of ZTE’s ambition to become a top three handset provider by 2015.
“The numbers speak for themselves. With 50 percent growth in handset shipments and 400 percent growth in smartphone shipments, we are confident that we are entering a new era in the mobile terminal market. The ZTE Era captures the excitement we feel about the future and brings it to life in a fantastic new device,” said Mr. He Shiyou, Executive Vice President and Head of the Terminals Division at ZTE.
According to industry analyst Gartner, ZTE was ranked the world’s No.4 in terms of handset shipments in Q4 2011 and ZTE smartphone sales are growing faster than any other vendor except Apple.
“In 2012, ZTE products will be building up from the low-middle end of the market into the middle-high end, with the ZTE Era being the best example of that development,” Mr. He Shiyou said. “We will continue our long-standing cooperation with operators around the world, but we will also continue to build our distributor channels (both ODM and OEM), and we will be focusing our marketing in particular on the high-end markets of Europe, America, Japan and China.”
The ZTE Era will be launched in Europe and China in the second half of 2012.
The Era, together with the comprehensive portfolio of ZTE terminals, is on display at MWC 2012 in Barcelona on the ZTE booth in Hall 8, stand B145.