Chinese smartphone market is one of the most competitive ones in the world. This is the largest smartphone market in the world, and there are a ton of domestic companies trying to beat each other in terms of sales and profit, not to mention foreign heavyweight companies that are also included in the mix. Well, there’s a new domestic player in town, a company called ZUK. This is a very interesting company which is headed by Lenovo’s former VP, Chang Cheng. ZUK is actually backed by both Qihoo 360 and Lenovo, and the former company invested $409 million in ZUK, so they definitely mean business and it will be interesting to see what can they do in such a highly-competitive environment.
Anyhow, we’ve already talked about ZUK, and the company’s upcoming Cyanogen-powered ZUK Z1 smartphone which will reportedly be a high-end offering by the company. We didn’t know anything regarding the specs of this thing at the time, but a listing has popped up online revealing partial specs of this device. According to the listing, the ZUK Z1 will feature a 5.5-inch 1080p (1920 x 1080) display along with 3GB of RAM and 16 or 32GB of in-built storage. The device will allegedly feature a 13-megapixel snapper on the back, and a 5-megapixel shooter is going to be available on the front side of this handset. The source also claims that the ZUK Z1 will offer support for global 4G LTE (FDD-LTE) networks. Previous information said that the device will feature a rather large battery unit, and that it will be a dual-SIM handset. The fingerprint scanner has also been mentioned, though we still don’t know where will it be located.
That’s all the spec info that we’ve managed to dig up, unfortunately there’s still no information when this device might become available nor what will it look like. One thing’s for sure though, it will come with Cyanogen OS pre-installed on top of Android (much like YU’s and Smartfren’s devices which launched recently), and it will quite probably be very affordable. Interesting enough, Qihoo 360 has already partnered up with Coolpad recently in order to open up a QiKU company which will also manufacture smartphones. Things are getting really interesting in China, and we’ll let you know as soon as we managed to dig up any additional info when it comes to ZUK or their upcoming Z1 handset.