China Mobile, the country’s biggest mobile telco, has announced the winning bidders for its tender of three to four million mobile TV smartphones, with Lenovo, Huawei, and ZTE being the selected hardware makers.
The order is believed to be for six different handsets, of 500,000 to 600,000 units each. All of them will be 3G smartphones, on the homegrown TD-SCDMA frequency that China Mobile uses, and they will all be low- to mid-level phones on the cheaper end of the smartphone scale.
Mobile TV is the most unique feature that the phones will bring. Again, this is a China-developed technology – the CMMB standard for mobile TV transmission – that is being pushed by the state-owned China Mobile.
The mobile TV roll-out started in March of this year, across 300 cities and to huge fanfare in (state) media – see this Sina Tech report from the time (article in Chinese).
It’s not clear which OS this new batch of mobiles will be running, but it is very likely that they’re also rocking China Mobile’s own Android modification, dubbed OPhone, which has mobile TV support baked in – as seen in the two photos of the OPhone-powered Lenovo O1 in this post.
China Mobile has struggled to get appealing handsets onto its TD-SCDMA network, but this year finally got some attractive top-end Motorola and HTC smartphones.
Between the previous sales figures and this new crop of mobile TV smartphones, China Mobile actually looks set to reach its initial goal of selling five million of them by the end of this year. Perhaps by then I will also have seen someone actually watching live TV on their phone, which I’ve not yet spotted.
[News source: Marbridge Consulting; Photo source: Zol.com.cn]
Stay updated on the go with our mobile app.
Get latest insights with smoother, more personalized experience through TIA mobile app.
