Over the past year or so I’ve watched Huawei evolve very quickly with handsets that can almost rival those from the top smartphone makers right now at the high-end, which is a little surprising, considering they’ve been known for being mainly a low-end kind of company. Its sister company, ZTE has also been historically known as a company that makes inexpensive and low-end products, but that may be about to change by the end of the year.
Some leaks from ZTE are showing that they are about to release a monster phone based on the very powerful Cortex A15 chip, which will most likely be dual core (source says multi-core), and even though it will have such a powerful chip inside, they will also try to beat everyone else to the game of smartphone thinness, with a 6.2mm thin body. That would make it the thinnest smartphone in the world, and it would be crazy thin. I don’t know how practical that will be, and if it will slip between your fingers or not, but I bet it will look and feel great.
The ZTE Athena device is also rumored to have a 720p IPS screen, which is expected these days from a high-end flagship, but it’s still nice to see that ZTE can pull it off, too. It will also come with 64 GB of internal storage, probably as the default storage. The device will run Android 4.0, although with pretty light MiFlavor UI on top of it. It might also come with some 3D background, like the one in the ZTE Era that was showcased at MWC this year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tZi_LdGSpo
I expect some very good devices to come out from both ZTE and Huawei by the end of the year, and especially in 2013, as they try to out-compete the current top manufacturers, and each other.