3G Insight - ZTE to make smartphones mass market

Piggybacking on the announcement that it already has a commercially available Windows 6.5 handset available, China's ZTE emphasized how it ends to make smartphones genuinely affordable.Figures like 22 per cent of all handsets in 2010 being smartphones and raising that to 40 per cent in 2012. ZTE is achieving its goal of producing smartphones that can be sold by operators for "well under 200 Euros" through two means. Firstly it is utilising chipsets from Qualcomm. Secondly, it has created a single smartphone hardware platform which, according to ZTE's top honcho - He Shiyou - can run any OS.

Piggybacking on the announcement that it already has a commercially available Windows 6.5 handset available, China's ZTE ZTE emphasized how it ends to make smartphones genuinely affordable. Figures like 22 per cent of all handsets in 2010 being smartphones and raising that to 40 per cent in 2012.

ZTE is achieving its goal of producing smartphones that can be sold by operators for "well under 200 Euros" through two means. Firstly it is utilising chipsets from Qualcomm. Secondly, it has created a single smartphone hardware platform which, according to ZTE's top honcho - He Shiyou - can run any OS.

In theory that would mean Android, Windows and maybe even Symbian. He also hinted that ZTE has the technology to produced a bespoke OS if any customer asks for it.

So how come ZTE has the first 6.5 handset and no-one talks about it. Simples. The Blubelt II is merely an update to an existing handset - the Bluebelt, of course. Crucially, however, it is a handset produced exclusively for Portugal's TMN.

So, naturally, it is stuck in Portugese and only works on TMN's network. So not speaking Portuguese and possessing no TMN SIM, none of us could actually test it at the October 6th launch.

TMN will be offering another ZTE handset - the Silverbelt. The Bluebelt is a Blackberry killer and the II version boasts GPS from N-drive. The Silverbelt has no GPS but has a motion sensor so it effectly targets the youth/gamer market. I even believe it might actually have SIM City built in.