Huawei Technologies on Friday revealed details on its newest smartphone running on Google’s Android operating system, in the latest show of the company’s aim to boost its profile and its penetration of new markets with low-priced Android phones.
- Huawei
- Huawei’s touchscreen Ideos X5
The touchscreen Ideos X5, which runs on Android 2.2, will go on sale in Singapore, Hong Kong and New Zealand this month, Victor Xu, chief marketing officer for Huawei’s device division, said.
The phone will be priced at $250 to $300 and will also launch in other markets, including North America, he said in webcasted remarks, without giving a time frame for those markets.
That price range is more expensive than an earlier version of the Ideos phone, which Huawei launched in September and said would have a recommended retail price of between $100 and $200 for pay-as-you-go customers. But it’s still about half the price of certain Android phones popular in the U.S. Verizon Wireless, for instance, lists the full retail price of Motorola’s Droid X smartphone as $569.99, though it doesn’t actually sell the phone without a data package.
Huawei has launched about 10 Android smartphones and will launch 10 more smartphones in 2011, beginning with the Ideos X5, Xu said. Huawei has sold more than 1 million units of the earlier Ideos phone, driven by sales in the U.S. and Japan, he said.
The Chinese company shipped more than 3 million Android smartphones last year and over 120 million units of all handsets and other devices, Xu said. Huawei has an Android tablet device called the S7.
Despite these offerings, Huawei remains far from becoming a globally recognized handset maker. Huawei-branded phones accounted for 1.3% of the 348 million mobile phones shipped globally in the third quarter, ranking the company at eleventh place, according to market researcher IDC. Nokia phones ranked first with a 32% share, IDC said.
IDC’s figures, however, don’t include phones that are made by Huawei but branded with the name of a mobile operator, which is a common practice for the company especially in developed markets.
Separately on Friday, Huawei’s cross-town rival ZTE said it plans to launch a tablet called ZTE Light LTE this year, adding to a series of Android tablets from the company. It didn’t give any details. ZTE, which like Huawei is based in the Chinese city of Shenzhen and is mainly a maker of telecommunications equipment, has also been pushing to sell more of its Android devices in developed markets.
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