The Consumer Electronics Show continues to give us some hints about what’s coming up for 2013. Lenovo senior executive JD Howard has spilled the beans on their plans to produce a Windows Phone 8 device as early as this year.
Microsoft and Lenovo are tight business partners and the ThinkPad brand is heavily favoured by business and enterprise customers. At present Lenovo have some Android devices on the market but it’s not difficult to see how having a Windows Phone offering may help them sell a more complete Microsoft package.
The message is pretty clear that they are only ‘considering’ producing a Windows Phone device at this point - only saying as much as there is a “good chance”. He goes on to say that Lenovo will go where the market is strongest and that happens to be Android at the moment, where they see the market as “very solid”. They have just announced a whole range of new Android handsets at CES if that point wasn’t clear enough.
Possible reasons cited for making a Windows Phone seem to stem from what Lenovo say are potential consumer concerns over Android security vulnerabilities. He goes on to say that Windows Phone 8 should prove a solution to those worried about such issues as the OS is inherently more secure. Lenovo is said to be in the ‘planning cycle’ at present and the proposal to go ahead and make a Windows Phone is being put forward for review. If they then decide to fulfil their plans they report we could see one as early as this year.
Lenovo is already tooled to produce Android devices and certainly has the manufacturing skills to bring a handset to market in a short time span. Even though they have not yet given the green light to go ahead then it would mean a very quick turnaround would be needed. Given that, we wonder if Lenovo have been prototyping devices and talking with its customers to test the waters.
There have been rumours of a Lenovo device before and it’s not a massive jump to see why having another Microsoft product can help their overall product portfolio. At the very launch of Windows Phone 7 we saw Dell enter into the market presumably with the same ideas about selling a whole package to business. Dell has since pulled out of the running but Lenovo could have the resources and business savvy to make such an endeavour work.
We’d certainly like to see what Lenovo could bring to the platform, if it is built as solidly as their ThinkPad range it could be a winner. What would it be called, ThinkPhone or perhaps IdeaPhone?
Source: ZDNet
