Smartphone maker looks to foreign markets for growth
Tech firm Bkav is seeking new markets for its smartphone,Bphone, after joining meetings with foreign distributors at a recent global summit on mobile telecommunications in Hong Kong, according to Vietnamese media.
Bkav representatives met with many network operators that also act as smartphone distributors from Thailand, India, Indonesia, and a European nation on the sidelines of the Qualcomm 3G/LTE Summit, according to news website VnReview.
The firm engaged in talks with True Move, which has a 24.6% market share, or 26 million subscribers, in Thailand and Telenor, a provider of mobile services in Europe which is investing in mobile networks in Asia, VnReview reported.
But Bkav, which is based in Hanoi, refused to talk about what was discussed during these meetings, the news website said.
According to the agenda of the three-day summit, Bkav worked with senior leaders of American chipmaker Qualcomm, which is supplying microchips to the Vietnamese company, on the next generation of the Bphone, which is expected to be released in the first quarter of next year.
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| A customer holds a Bphone at an FPT store in Ho Chi Minh City on May 6, 2015. Photo: Tuoi Tre |
Andy Chu, director for Bkav Singapore and the Asian region, confirmed the information but declined to go into further detail, according to VnReview.
The tech firm unveiled the first generation of its flagship Bphone at a 2,000-attendee event in Hanoi on May 26.
The Bphone is 7.5mm wide with a Sharp 5.0 inch full HD screen, protected with Corning’s Gorilla Glass, which Samsung and Apple also use for their devices.
The full aluminum body handset is equipped with Toshiba’s 3GB RAM and the Qualcomm CPU Snapdragon 801 quad-core 2.5GHz.
The Bphone’s 3,000mAh battery is facilitated with a fast-charging technology called Quick Charge 2.0.
It has a 13MP primary camera and a 5MP secondary one, both covered with sapphire glass.
At the summit, Hideki Ogura, general manager of Platform Enabling Group under Toshiba Electronics Asia, used the Bphone to demonstrate the TransferJet connection technology, according to news website VnExpress.
TransferJet is a close-range wireless technology that helps users transfer data like music, high definition videos between mobile devices at very fast speed.
According to Toshiba, this technology can attain a speed of up to 375 Mbps in data transmission, enough to transfer a 20-second HD video file within one second.