China joins smartphone race
February 27, 2012
Attempting to shed its image of a low-end mobile phone manufacturer, China's Huawei Technologies CO Ltd said it had developed the "world's fastest smartphone", Richard Yu, the company's Device chairman announced on the sidelines of the 2012 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The phone – named Ascend D quad – will be available from April, and boasts a quad core processor, making it twice as rapid as current smartphones using dual core.
"We've listened to people's top demands from smartphones: speed, long battery life, high quality visual and audio capabilities and a compact lightweight handset," Yu said, adding that the company's phone met these requirements.
Huawei sees the regular mobile phone market as largely exploited, but regards the smartphone segment as booming in the years ahead.
"With the transformation of the smartphone market, we see an opportunity," Huawei's chief marketing officer Shao Yang told the AFP news agency.
Big players challenged
Worldwide smartphone sales grew 53.5 percent in 2011, making up 34 percent of all mobile handsets sold in the year, according to data released by Informa Telecoms and Media research group.
With the number of mobile subscribers set to top 1 billion in China this year, there's cut-throat competition among South Korea's Samsung Electronics, Nokia from Finland, Apple Inc, as well as local firms Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp.
"Chinese handset makers have been actively promoting their smartphones with China's telecoms operators, so we saw ZTE and Huawei gain significant market share," CK Lu, an analyst with the research group Gartner, told the Reuters news agency.
In Barcelona, Huawei was unable to give a retail price for its Ascend D phone, but said that it would be "15 percent more competitive than others of the same class."
uh/slk (AFP, Reuters)