Chinese smartphone manufacturer has just announced via Twitter that it plans to unveil an “advanced gaming smartphone” next week. The company has not yet provided much detail about what this phone is called or what exactly it will entail.
Even though they are less well known in the west, ZTE is one of the largest smartphone manufacturers on the planet, having a huge customer base in China. They have also produced a number of devices that have been sold under the Orange brand in the UK including, the Orange Monte Carlo and the Orange San Francisco, but in recent years ZTE has increasingly pushed its devices under its own name.
At this year’s Mobile World Congress, held in Barcelona in February, the company announced the quad core ZTE Era and just this week also announced the exceptionally affordable Android powered ZTE Kis which will be sold for less than £50. The new “advanced gaming smartphone” is thought to be something entirely different though.
As most ZTE smartphones have so far run on Android it can be assumed that the new device will too, either with Gingerbread or Ice Cream Sandwich. Android will provide the new phone with plenty of existing games from Google Play. If the emphasis is high powered gaming then it is likely it will be dual core or quad core.
Earlier phones designed specifically for gaming, like the Xperia Play and 2003′s Nokia N-Gage, have come with gaming control pads – so there is a possibility of this too. The phone could also potentially run on Windows Phone and make use of Xbox LIVE.
Of course, this announcement could simply be related to the UK release for the ZTE Era or PF112 HD (the announcement was made on ZTE UK’s Twitter account). These phones were first unveiled in February but have still not been released. They could be more likely candidates than the launch of a completely new device that no one has come across before. The wording of the Tweet suggests that it will be a phone that will be released, rather than just unveiled.
The ZTE Era runs on Android Ice Cream Sandwich, has a 1.3GHz quad core chip, 1GB RAM, 8GB (+32GB microSD) storage, DLNA Wi-Fi, HSPA+, and a pretty decent 1080p 8 megapixel camera. It is hard to see what would make the Era more qualified as a gaming phone than the likes of the Galaxy S3 or HTC One X, considering it is fairly similar in spec, but ZTE is quite justified in calling it an “advanced gaming smartphone”.
