Chinese vendor Lenovo plans to revitalise its handset efforts, setting its sights on a rapidly-growing domestic smartphone market for initial growth.
The company has ambitious plans for handset division Lenovo Mobile, including growing it to account for 10-20% of revenue within five years.
At the launch of its new Lephone handset yesterday, Lenovo said it would concentrate its handset marketing efforts on China at first, then broaden the scope to include emerging markets, and then developed markets, WSJ.com said.
Lenovo hopes to sell millions of phones over the next five years, and tens of millions in subsequent years.
The company will develop phones tailored for enterprise and consumer markets that cater to all three 3G standards operating in China – W-CDMA, cdma2000 and TD-SCDMA.
Lenovo's first offering under the new strategy - the Lephone smartphone - runs on OPhone, a version of Google's Android OS customised by China Mobile.
The touchscreen handset is powered by a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, ships with a snap-on keyboard, and supports 3G, Wi-Fi and A-GPS.
It was produced specifically for the Chinese market, and there are no plans for an international launch.
Lenovo sold Lenovo Mobile in 2008 for $100 million (€74 million), but bought it back for twice the price in November last year, GigaOM said.