ZTE and Inside Secure to make NFC phones

Chinese company ZTE and Inside Secure have inked a deal to build a fleet of NFC phones. If you haven’t heard of ZTE before you should know that they are in the top five of mobile phone producers in the world. In Europe and the States, we have only recently began to see their wares but trust us when we tell you that they will become a household name in the not too distant future. Inside Secure is a competitor to NXP Semiconductors. They build the software and hardware chips that make NFC work in mobile phones. Together, ZTE and Inside Secure make a formidable team that could compete with the likes of Nokia, LG and Huawei, as they intend to launch a host of Android based SCDMA smartphones that include NFC technology in the not so distant future.

The ZTE and Inside Secure NFC phones deal

Last year (2010) ZTE sold 90 million mobile phones with its largest growth market being Europe, closely followed by the United States and Japan. ZTE will use INSIDE MicroRead^® NFC controller and the companion Open NFC™ protocol stack. It will enable consumers in China and elsewhere to use ZTE 3G smartphones for a broad range of secure NFC applications, including payments, transportation, loyalty, ticketing and access control. What is interesting here is there is no mention of 4G technologies. ZTE is known as a budget focused brand and this could suggest that the firm is not ready to deploy WiMax or LTE phone for while.

“Both smartphones and feature phones are essential to our long-term success in the global handset market, and NFC is quickly becoming an important component of these platforms,” said Wang Yongzhong, General Manager of GSM and UMTS handset products at ZTE Corporation.”Our ongoing partnership with INSIDE Secure gives us access to mature, proven NFC technologies and superior support that enables us to bring our handsets to market quickly and cost effectively,” he added.

“We are very pleased to cooperate with a well-known brand handset maker such as ZTE for NFC deployment worldwide,” said Remy de Tonnac, CEO of Inside Secure, speaking about the ZTE and Inside Secure deal. “Based on our advanced NFC technology, we believe that we can provide an excellent NFC solution to ZTE in China and globally.”

What we know about ZTE and Inside Secure’s NFC phone ambitions

We do know that the mass producer of smartphones is incorporating some NFC sweetness in to its products. We can expect that there will be many NFC phones flooding the marketplace at low costs and we are looking forward to seeing what ZTE and Inside Secure cook up.