Chinese electronics maker Lenovo is preparing to sell the smartphone that it announced at the Consumer Electronics Show, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Despite the current frosty state of relations between the Chinese government and Google – whose Android enterprise mobility platform will run on the LePhone, as the device is called – Lenovo seems resolved to release the device in China by May, followed by a more widespread roll-out later in 2010.

The LePhone will be sold by all three of China’s major cell phone operators: China Unicom, China Mobile, and China Telecom. The Journal reports that Lenovo’s board today approved the plan to repurchase the company’s spun-off Lenovo Mobile wing for $200 million, twice what it sold for in March 2008.

Experts say that the Chinese smartphone market is growing even faster than the smartphone market at large, which could account for the fact that most cell phone crossovers between the west and China have gone the other way: Some U.S. companies, including Lenovo’s rival Dell, make cell phones for sale in China but not in the U.S.

This entry was posted by Mobility Management News Desk on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Managing Mobile Devices News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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