China’s ZTE and Huawei have made bold statements at Mobile World Congress this year of their intents to be seen as global players in the smartphone market.
ZTE announced its ambition to grow its international smartphone business with new high-end handsets in Barcelona this week.
As well as smartphones it will introduce tablets and Internet TV devices.
"We believe that the key to making the mobile Internet widely available is to lower the entry threshold,” said He Shiyou, executive v-p of ZTE.
According to market analyst IDC, ZTE was among the top five in the world in terms of the sales volume of handsets in 2010.
ZTE has previously focused on middle-to-low-end products, but now it believes the high-end smartphone and tablet markets is where it wanst to be.
In the last two years it introduced its first Android smartphone and tablet PC in the European market.
This week in Barcelona it unveiled a range of smartphones including the Skate Android smartphone with a 4.3-inch screen.
It uses the Android 2.3 operating system, an 800MHz processor and the Adreno 200 graphics processing unit.
ZTE’s latest tablet PC, the Light 2 uses the Pixel Qi's sunlight-readable LCD and Dolby sound. A 10-inch tablet with a faster processor and supporting Android 3.0 will be launched in Q3 2011.
ZTE is also to provide basestations for a field trial of TD-LTE being carried out by German operartor E-Plus.
Huawei has recently had a trial of LTE network technology with Portugal-based operator Optimus. Last year, Optimus selected Huawei's SingleRAN system for its GSM network to support future LTE rollout.
To date, Huawei has deployed more than 1,000 SingleRAN sites to Optimus. Huawei introduced an Android Gingerbread smartphone, IDEOS X3 at the Mobile World Congress.