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Chinese smartphone maker ZTE said that the firm’s Mobile World Congress-announced ZTE Skate smartphone would appear in the ‘early second half of 2011’.
In briefing with gadget website pocket-lint.co.uk, ZTE UK boss Wu Sa provided the update on the release of the 4.3-inch smartphone armed with an 800MHz CPU, Areno 200 graphics processor and running Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
Pocket-link speculated that the announcement meant ‘around July might be a good guess.’
The smartphone maker reportedly would not confirm whether the ZTE Skate would appear as a ZTE-branded device or be re branded by a carrier as previous models have been.
Pocket-lint said ZTE was ‘quite candid’ about wanting to raise the profile of the ZTE brand, likely as the firm seeks to emulate the success of Taiwanese HTC stepping out of the ODM shadow and adopting a premium brand position.
While not the very highest specification, the ZTE Skate is very likely to be the most affordable large-screen full function Android smartphone when it arrives.
Android would also appear to be the continued focus for the world fifth-largest phone maker ZTE with the Journal reporting that ZTE boss Sa recently criticised Microsoft and the firm’s Windows Phone 7 OS.
Windows Phone was not, according to Sa, popular enough and Microsoft’s market response not "sufficiently robust" to convince the Chinese manufacturer to adopt Windows Phone 7.
We might suggest the fact that Windows Phone 7 is currently locked to a fixed high specification by Microsoft while ZTE specialises in lower-end smartphones may also have something to do with it.
