Huawei planning major push into high-end smartphone market

SHENZHEN, CHINA: Huawei is planning to launch a range of high-end smartphones under its own brand in the next 12 months as the Chinese firm seeks to carve out a name in the handset market.

Huawei has previously made devices for other brands to customise, and concentrates mainly on the feature phone market. But it will now launch a range of high-end devices during 2011 and early 2012.

Richard Brennan, Huawei's vice director for industry standards, explained that the company is keen to improve awareness of its brand among mobile users in the consumer and business markets.

"We have been making white-label devices for a while, but now we want to start moving up the food chain to enterprise grade and premium type devices," he said.

"They will be devices with 4.3in and 4.5in screens at the very high end, and some 3.5in and 3.8in devices as well, with dual-core [processors] moving to quad-core over time. But we will also stick to making low-cost Android devices."

The high-end handsets will also be built on the Android platform, but Brennan added that Huawei is considering Windows Phone 7 and new chip vendors as the company looks to widen the scope of its offerings.

"[We are] looking hard at the convergence of Windows and ARM. We are not just Google and Android focused," he said.

On the tablet side, Brennan said that Huawei will concentrate on 7in devices for the time being, rather than moving to 10in, because the smaller form factor is more suited to the markets the company is targeting.