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Seemingly out of nowhere Lenovo announced a completely new brand that seems focused on delivering customization and high specs to users. This brand is named Zuk, and the first phone from the new spin-off is appropriately going to be called the Z1. This phone is rumored to ship with the latest version of Cyanogen OS, an OS lauded for its customization, features and regular updates among other positives. It seems the Zuk brand may be specifically for Lenovo to push out unique phones with the Cyanogen style on it, and now we’re learning a bit more about the features that are going to make this phone unique over other Cyanogen OS-powered phones like the OnePlus One, Yu Yureka and Yuphoria to name a few.
At a private event held in China Lenovo showed off some features of the Zuk Z1 that make it unique among phones both produced by Lenovo itself and other manufacturers as well. We didn’t get a look at the actual phone itself but the mockups of the front of the device and the explanation of proposed features are quite enlightening. First off the home button area, which may or may not be a physical button, looks to be a fingerprint scanner as well as a dedicated home key. In addition to this Zuk will be using a gesture based system to navigate throughout the OS, presumably like Meizu does with their phones. This means we could see something along the lines of swipe left to go back, swipe right for multi-tasking, etc. Specifics on this will have to be revealed later, but if it does end up running Cyanogen OS it’s likely these actions are completely customizable anyway.
Behind the glass will sit an incredibly large 4,xxx mAh battery that’s an undisclosed size, likely for engineering purposes until Zuk has the design and thickness nailed down pat. In addition to this the phone will fully support the unique network topology of China, supporting 2G and 3G of course but also the full range of 4G LTE no matter what carrier you choose; China Mobile, China Telecom or China Unicom. Other notable hardware revealed during the conference is the 13MP main camera, which is said to be the latest generation sensor from an undisclosed OEM. Android 5.1.1 CyanogenOS powers the experience and the phone is likely to launch for under 1999Yuan in late August or early September.
