Lenovo’s subsidiary is prepping something big

Jun 21, 2015 07:27 GMT  ·  By

We’ve recently told you that Lenovo unveiled a new brand in China, which it dubbed ZUK and will operate as an independent brand from the mother company.

Lenovo’s new subsidiary is already working on a smartphone, called the Z1, which incidentally is the name of the first smartphone with Tizen OS Samsung has ever released. But when the news about the first ZUK phone broke, we weren’t able to provide you with any information related to it. Luckily, a freshly squeezed report coming out of Gizmo China now sheds some light on the matter.

ZUK has been established so that Lenovo can better focus on the domestic market and find effective ways to keep the competition at bay.

While Lenovo will continue to focus on building hardware products, ZUK’s center of attention will be the software department.

A new Cyanogen OS phone is coming soon

And now we get an idea of what that truly means. It seems that OnePlus will soon be getting some stiff competition, because according to sources familiar with the matter, the new handset will make it out on the market with Cyanogen OS on board.

Apart from Lenovo, ZUK is also backed up by Chinese software company 360, which reportedly committed an impressive $409 / €360 million to the affair.

As you can see, Cyanogen OS is slowly spreading its wings over the mobile ecosystem and the new ZUK phone will help expand its dominion.

The current report also claims the phone will bundle a large battery (perhaps the company is looking at a dual-battery setup similar to what we can see in the Gionee M5) and a fingerprint scanner.

For the time being, other specifications remain unknown, but given the fact that the phone is supposed to make it out in the second half of the year, we could speculate the model will boast QHD panel (2,560 x 1,440 pixels) and maybe a new Snapdragon 820 processor under the hood.

We can also hypothesize that, given the Cyanogen OS connection, the ZUK Z1 will probably go on sale on international markets. So customers outside the confines of China might also be able to purchase it without problems.