ZTE has decided to step up its game to expand its reach in the mobile industry and has recently revealed plans to unveil a new high-end handset. The company hopes to improve from their position as a low-end smartphone manufacturer in the US as a formidable competitor for the rest of the higher ranking mobile companies.
Hagen Fendler, ZTE’s global chief design director, revealed that the company plans to unveil its new handset in January during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The decision to market a high-end handset is definitely a game changer for ZTE, which has been known for producing low-level and mid-level devices, and hopes to use their announcement at the CES to be a platform for their growth in the high-end smartphones market.
There have been hints that the company was heading towards this direction, though. Its recent handsets, the ZTE Warp Sequent and the Sprint Flash, were definitely mid-range devices with many features found only in high-end handsets; foretelling the company’s recent paradigm shift. The ZTE Warp Sequent has been noted for its impressive performance and midrange specs, which was quite a big bump over the company’s earlier devices in the same range. The phone is solidly built and comes with a 4.3-inch touch screen, acceptably decent 5 MP camera and a smooth Android 4.0 experience. The Sprint Flash, on the other hand, comes with 4G LTE compatibility, great range of photo-editing features and the same smooth Android 4.0 experience offered by the ZTE Warp Sequent.
The two phones, while aiming towards cracking the high-end barrier, fell short of doing so. The ZTE Warp Sequent suffered from slow 3G speeds, slow camera shutter speed and was only barely worth the price it was being sold for while the Spring Flash underwhelmed with bulky hardware, slow processing power, mediocre call quality and poor photo quality that failed to do justice to its 12 MP camera.
While ZTE’s last round of smartphones into the high-end handset market may have been flawed, the company has made a determined effort with its new mystery device and it can potentially make up for its track record of manufacturing devices with mediocre performance. The company released a statement announcing a $30 million investment into expanding its influence in the US market and has decided to allocate these funds into incorporating established technologies, improving lab capabilities and widening their reach with US carriers. ZTE is definitely taking positive steps towards its own progress although, given its track record, it still has much to prove to a sceptical market.
