ZTE, the Chinese handset vendor that isn’t quite as popular as their closest competitor, Huawei, has just announced the Grand X LTE. As the name implies, this thing has 4G LTE connectivity. That’s provided courtesy of the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 inside. Strangely enough, He Shiyou, the Head of ZTE’s Handset Division, says: “We are the first company to use the single-chip solution in a handset.” That’s incorrect. HTC’s One X is powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon S4, and it’s been out for several weeks already. Putting that aside, there’s nothing to really say about the Grand X LTE. It runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, it has a 720p display, an 8 megapixel camera, it screams Samsung clone, and it also has a 1900 mAh battery. No word on pricing, but we expect to see it on store shelves in Europe and Asia during the third quarter of the year. Oh and like the Galaxy Nexus, the Grand X LTE looks like it doesn’t use any front facing buttons. That gets two thumbs up from everyone at the office.
So will this phone sell? Again, it’s hard to say because we don’t know how much it’s going to cost. Chinese phone makers aren’t really known for their design skills, but they sure as hell are known for their discount prices. If they can ship HTC One X grade hardware, but for 100 EUR less than what HTC charges for their superphone, then the Grand X LTE may actually have a chance at succeeding. What worries us however is that Qualcomm is having some issues making enough S4 chips. The few that are coming out of the factory, who do you think will get them first? Probably Samsung. We’ve already seen HTC have to swap the S4 for the older S3 when selling the One S in Taiwan and India.
With that in mind, what makes you think ZTE will get priority access to chips?
Update: We believe the screen might be qHD. We’re looking into this.
@intomobile Hi, thanks for your interest! The screen of the #ZTE Grand X LTE is qHD.
— ZTE Corporation (@ZTEPress) June 19, 2012