14 DAY TRIAL // We’ve recently told you that Huawei is prepping to release its first smartphone ever to bundle its own home-grown Kirin OS, which is probably going to be the Honor 7. But Huawei is not the only Chinese device manufacturer looking to break bonds with Google’s Android and move into a separate direction.
A recent report coming out of Gizmo China indicates that Lenovo might be embarking on a similar path. The company has just unveiled a new brand in its home country, called ZUK, which will operate as an independent brand from the mother company.
ZUK’s purpose in the world would be to focus on the domestic market and to find ways to fight off the competition coming from companies like Xiaomi, Huawei and others.
ZUK is Lenovo's new baby
While Lenovo will continue to focus on building hardware, ZUK will spend time developing the software aspect of the device.
ZUK is already working on its first smartphone, which will be called the Z1. Incidentally, Samsung’s first Tizen OS smartphone is also called the Z1.
The handset should be announced later this year and will come with high-end specs and its home-grown software UI called ZUI.
With ZUK, Lenovo plans to focus its efforts on delivering a fluid software experience rather than hardware.
Now, if you were wondering why Lenovo chose to differentiate itself from ZUK, we should mention that it has to do with the fact that the company is a pretty large one (includes Motorola Mobility too) and making big moves might take a lot of time. On the other hand, ZUK is a smaller affair which will advance things more rapidly.
ZUK will only have 400 employees and 350 of them will be focusing on software. ZUK will also spend a lot of time developing ZUI Custom ROMs for its devices and gathering feedback from customers.
This all sounds very intriguing, but sadly, Lenovo hasn’t shared much in terms of specifications of the upcoming ZUK Z1.
We also need to note that ZUK will focus on the domestic market, so don’t expect to see its phones make a debut on the international market.
