Yesterday at MWC 2013, ZTE unveiled with great aplomb, the ZTE Grand Memo – a 5.7″ phablet which would be the first phone to be powered by the Snapdragon 800 processor, which is Qualcomm’s latest chipset for high-end devices. Other than this latest processor, the rest of the specs in the Grand Memo were not too impressive though, with a 720p display and 1GB of RAM. Not exactly the kind of supporting specs that need to rely on a Snapdragon 800 processor, eh?
Well, it turns out that what lies beneath, is not exactly what ZTE claimed yesterday. It turns out that the processor inside the grand Memo is actually a Snapdragon 600 which seems to tie in with the rest of the specs. Also, our pals at Android Police discovered while playing with the device that the test units on display at MWC were actually housing the APQ8064 processor, which is the codename for the Snapdragon S4 Pro, and not the Snapdragon 600. And the mess gets murkier – the device actually had just 1GB of RAM against the purported 2GB as mentioned in ZTE’s press release for the device. Incidentally, the press release hasn’t been rectified yet, to reflect the true specs of the device.
We cannot help but wonder how on earth botch-ups like these could occur, especially as far as actual components about the device are concerned. It’s not like we are talking about a subjective aspect of the device here. Secondly, ZTE mentioned yesterday during the announcement of the ZTE Open – the first official Firefox OS based phone, that it intends to be among the top 3 mobile brands by 2015. With incorrect information about key specs being communicated like in this case, a lot of users would have already started looking elsewhere for their next smartphone.
So essentially, ZTE has botched up the product launch of what could be best termed as a mid-range device, with two massive holes on the spec sheet – 1) What actually lies beneath? Snapdragon 800, Snapdragon 600 or Snapdragon S4 Pro ? 2) How much RAM – 1GB or 2GB? Pretty big holes these, and ZTE’s going to have a lot of damage-control to do after this mess, if it wants to get anywhere close to that vision of becoming one of top three mobile brands over the next couple of years.