So far, Huawei has been known to US and European customers for their huge variety of HSDPA modems – the image below was shot at this year’s CeBit, and shows their most successful model:
However, the company has also produced a variety of little-known low-end handsets. While the company originally planned to kill this department due to smartphone pressures, Huawei’s James Chen thinks that the global economic crisis will prolong the department’s profitability so that smartphone projects can be started without external funding:
Despite recently calling off the sale of part of its terminal business, Huawei is planning major expansions in phones and mobile broadband devices. The economic crisis will extend the life of low-end feature-phones which have been its main handset product, giving the company time to deliver smartphones running all the major operating systems, without outside investment, he said.
Specifically, one Symbian-based and one Android-based smartphone are expected to be finished by H12009 – but they will not be sold to end customers:
Huawei’s smartphones will be sold through operators, not bearing Huawei’s brand, said Chen, and the company has no plans to deliver content or services as Nokia does. “We will stand firm in the camp of the operators. Although we will customise phones, we will never directly sell services to the end user.”
As of now, nothing is known about pricing, features or form factors. Nevertheless, I personally think that the device will sell pretty well, and will also be solidly built (at least to some extent). Huawei’s modems are sold by almost every carrier world-wide, which means that their “road to market” will be easier than the one faced by most others.
Via PCWorld
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