ZTE is one of the largest China-based smartphone manufacturers, and for those of you who did not know this, they’re also the fourth largest smartphone manufacturer in the US. ZTE has been focusing on the US market for quite some time now, and it seems like it was worth it in the end. Anyhow, this company had introduced the several devices this year, and now they have some new info to share with us, read on.
The company has reached out to us to announce the launch of the so-called ‘Project CSX’, which is essentially a crowdsourced mobile device that ZTE plans to launch next year. The company’s member-led forum called ‘Z-Community’ will actually serve as a base for ideas and feedback during the development of this device. If you’d like to join the Z-Community in order to help push this project forward, you can visit community.zteusa.com website. “This is the first time a phone manufacturer is stepping out and crowdsourcing something entirely new, from start to finish. It’s a bold approach for the industry that demonstrates how ZTE keeps consumers at the heart of everything we imagine, design and deliver. Project CSX is taking our core value to the next level,” said Lixin Cheng, the chairman and CEO of ZTE USA.
ZTE seems Project CSX as a new, and fresh way of developing new products, the company hopes they will be able to manufacture an even better product thanks to feedback from consumers during the development project. The submissions are held to three rules, says ZTE. This must be a mobile product, the technology for its development needs to be realistically possible by 2017, and the device has to be affordable enough. Now, to top all of this off, you should also know that ZTE will award best ideas for the development of this handset, best ideas will be awarded by small cash prizes, and you’ll even be able to win a trip to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas next year.
“Sometimes the best ideas come from people outside of a company who have a fresh take we wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. ZTE is an end-to-end telecommunications company and has the resources to develop all types of devices, not just smartphones. Maybe there are other ways we could be connecting that we have never imagined. We are excited to find out,” said Jeff Yee, vice president of Technology Planning and Partnerships at ZTE USA. That is more or less it, the Project CSX sure seems like an interesting approach to product development by ZTE, that’s for sure, it will be interesting to see what comes out of all this.