Add ViewSonic to the list of Asian consumer electronics manufacturers trying to muscle in on the U.S. smartphone market. The Taipei-based company tells it will be showing a new Google Android-based handset at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The phone, dubbed ViewPhone 3, is aimed at Latin American consumers, but will also be available in the U.S., making it ViewSonic’s first U.S. handset release.
He declined to share ViewSonic’s tablet sales figures but said the business is going well enough that the company decided to expand its phone efforts. (ViewSonic has sold phones before, though only in limited areas, such as China and Taiwan.) The company recently acquired a group of employees from Taiwanese tech manufacturing giant Foxconn to bolster its phone design and business development capabilities. “We’re growing our phone portfolio and adding resources,” said Holstein in an interview.Releasing a smartphone may seem an unusual move for ViewSonic which is best known for its LCD monitors and displays. But a ViewSonic product manager who is based in the company’s Southern California office, sees the phone as a natural extension of ViewSonic’s tablet business. ViewSonic began releasing its ViewPad tablets in 2010. It currently sells six models, in either 7 or 10-inch sizes, and will unveil several more at CES.
The ViewPhone 3 is not going to wow consumers looking for standout specs. It has a decent set of features, including a 3.5-inch touchscreen, 5 megapixel camera, 800 MHz Qualcomm processor and 512 GB of RAM. The ViewPhone 3′s flavor of Android is Gingerbread (2.3), however, which has been available for over a year, and it runs on 3G technology instead of the faster 4G.
ViewSonic doesn’t intend the phone to be bleeding-edge or even high-end. Like the majority of its products, ViewSonic is aiming at the “value seeker” consumer with the ViewPhone 3, which will have an unsubsidized price of $250. The device’s most unusual feature – support for two SIM cards – is a capability popular in emerging markets. “It’s a low to mid-range phone,” noted Holstein. That segment, he adds, is where the majority of growth in the global smartphone market is expected to materialize.
When the ViewPhone 3 is ready to ship, in March, ViewSonic intends to market the phone in Latin America. It will start with Mexico, Chile and Colombia and gradually roll out availability to other Latin American countries. The company took a similar approach with its tablets, explained Holstein, and found it effective. The Latin American smartphone market, he said, is poised to grow 44% by 2015, outpacing other geographic regions.
At the same time, ViewSonic plans to release the ViewPhone 3 on its website for American consumers. The phone will be sold “unlocked” for use on AT&Tand T-Mobile USA’s networks. ViewSonic would like to sign deals with U.S. carriers but has had a hard time so far. A partnership with Leap Wireless to carry one of its 7-inch Android tablets fizzled last year.
ViewSonic is hoping commercial and enterprise customers will buy the ViewPhone 3, which would lessen the need to win over finicky consumers. School districts, hospitals and government agencies have adopted ViewSonic’s tablets and are already big customers of its monitors, projectors and digital signs. He said several U.S. companies including cruise line operators have expressed interest in a ViewSonic phone.
In a sign of optimism, ViewSonic has already planned follow-ons to the ViewPhone 3 and plans to announce them as soon as the middle of the year. Some of these future phones will be higher-end than the ViewPhone 3, said Product manager, and will feature the latest Android version, Ice Cream Sandwich.
