ZTE’s 5.5-inch Grand S II lets your friends unlock the phone with their voice

After a brief tease last week, ZTE has at last revealed the Grand S II. The Android 4.3 smartphone has all the necessary ingredients of an early 2014 flagship, including a 5.5-inch 1080p screen, a 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800, a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel sensor up front. However, its real centerpiece is its voice recognition, which is more elaborate than ZTE hinted at a few days ago. The Grand S II will recognize multiple users’ voices; unlike the Moto X, you can let friends and family unlock the phone solely through speech. Other voice features are familiar, but welcome. You can take photos with spoken commands, and a My-drive mode tweaks the voice recognition for quicker hands-free control while in the car. We’re not big on the 16GB of built-in storage, but the hefty 3,000mAh battery should last longer than the 1,780mAh pack in the original Grand S. About the only mystery left is the Grand S II’s launch schedule, but we hope to learn more about that in the near future.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Source: ZTE

ZTE’s Android-powered Projector Hotspot dishes out 1080p video and US-native LTE

We’ve seen some pretty clever hotspots in our day, but ZTE is determined to trump them all with its new Projector Hotspot. As the name implies, it’s both a 1080p DLP projector (with HDMI and WiFi Display support) as well as an 8-device LTE hotspot, giving your mobile devices a big screen and internet access at the same time. However, it’s smart enough that you sometimes won’t need another device at all. This hotspot runs Android 4.2, folks — you can hop online through its 4-inch touchscreen and project content from any app or website. ZTE plans to bring the Projector Hotspot to the US sometime in 2014, although it isn’t yet saying which carriers (if any) are involved with the launch.

Filed under: Peripherals, Wireless, Networking, Mobile

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Source: ZTE

ZTE comes to CES with voice-savvy Grand S II smartphone, fitness-ready BlueWatch

ZTE clearly wants to make its presence felt at CES this year; it’s coming to the show with no less than seven devices. The Grand S II headlines the pack as the company’s first smartphone with “high-precision” voice commands, which let you both unlock the phone and trigger the camera. The company is shy on other details, although we’d expect the Grand S II to have the best (grandest?) performance of ZTE’s range. The company is also launching the 5-inch Nubia 5S and 4.7-inch Nubia 5S mini; just what they offer beyond the Nubia 5 isn’t clear, but the larger 5S will have the horsepower to capture 4K video through its 13-megapixel f/2.0 camera. Frugal Americans will want to check out the Sonata 4G, a 4-inch budget phone launching on Aio Wireless with a 1.4GHz Snapdragon 400 chip, 1GB of RAM and a 5-megapixel shooter. An unnamed “iconic” 5.7-inch handset is also coming with a quad-core chip and wireless charging.

A trio of accessories will debut at the same time. The company’s promised smartwatch will launch as the BlueWatch, with support for both remote phone control and a built-in pedometer. ZTE is also promising a 4G-equipped hotspot and an AT&T Wireless Home Base that connects landline phones to the carrier’s cellular network. Ship dates and prices aren’t available for any of the CES introductions at this stage, but you can be sure that we’ll get more details on the show floor.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, AT&T

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Source: BusinessWire