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ZTE sells 2 million San Francisco smartphones
CHINESE PHONE MAKER ZTE claims it has sold over 2 million of its San Francisco smartphones, which it says makes it one of the best selling worldwide.
The phone was rebranded by Orange from ZTE's name of the Blade and pitched as a budget Android handset. ZTE has a goal of reaching 80 million handset sales in 2011 across its entire range.
The company said, "ZTE has now sold more than two million ZTE Blade handsets, making it one of the best-selling smartphones in the world."
The phone is available in over 30 countries and regions including the UK where Orange first launched it in 2010. The phone has been offered for as little as £79.
"The ZTE Blade's popularity actually exceeded that of the iPhone 4 in the UK at one stage in early 2011 according to online purchase tracking company Hotukdeals." ZTE added.
This might be true but to put things in perspective Apple sold 18.65 million Iphones in just the second quarter this year, which was a 113 per cent increase from its second quarter last year.
Another big player in the smartphone market is Samsung, which shifted 10 million Galaxy S handsets by January of this year. It has also made one of the biggest stirs in the market this year with the Galaxy S II that is proving to be a very popular phone.
ZTE said, "In the annual handset opinion survey organised by the online XDA Developers forum, the ZTE Blade won 24.66 [per cent] of the total votes, placing it first among the 32 handsets as judged by forum users."
The successor to the Blade, er, San Francisco, is ZTE's Skate, a bigger and faster version that has a 4.3in screen and an 800MHz processor running Android 2.3 Gingerbread. ZTE told us in March that the Skate will tip up in the UK in the second half of the year. We've just noticed that Orange has the phone on its 'coming soon' page and has renamed it the 'Monte Carlo'. µ
Tags: Hardware
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The San Francisco is a great phone if you
unlock it,hack the ROM and remove all of Orange's proprietary software in the process.I know at least 4 people who have been running a happily hacked phone for months now.
When I went into the Orange shop to purchase another phone for hacking, the Orange Salesman actively told me not to buy it, stating that everyone of the San Francisco's had been returned. He used expletives to describe their own phone. I told him of my experience and suggested it was their software, not the phone. This overloaded his small processor, he grunted something, used another expletive and juggled several other bricks in my face.
Buy it, hack it. Monte Carlo will no doubt be the same...