It seems that the Lenovo LePhone K860 has been spotted when trying to pass the Chinese TENAA certification, and sources say that it’s running a quad core Exynos processor, the same one that can be found in Galaxy S3 and in the Meizu MX. The phone is supposedly a 5″ one with a 720p display, 1 GB of RAM and Android 4.0.
Why would Samsung allow both of these companies to use the same processor that is available in their flagship smartphone? Because from their point of view, it makes good business sense. Remember Samsung is also making a lot of ARM chips for Apple, although it’s Apple designing them, and Samsung is just manufacturing them. So Samsung has decided to also sell their chip to other companies for good money.
This way they shoot 2 birds with one stone. They increase revenues and they drop the cost of the chip across the board thanks to higher volumes. They also get the added bonus that the more Mali GPU’s are in the market, the same ones they are using, the more we’ll see games that will be optimized for those GPU’s, which means they will look better on Samsung’s devices. It’s a win-win.
Lenovo was supposed to launch an Atom Medfield 1.6 Ghz single core chip smartphone, as well, but it looks like their customers are more interested in dual core and quad core ARM processors with much better GPU’s, as well as better battery life. This phone will also have a 5″ display, which means it needs to be very efficient. At 5″ it should be more of a competitor with Samsung’s own Galaxy Note, although hopefully we’ll see the Note 2 with Exynos 5, not the same chip as the one in Galaxy S3.