SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Feb. 20, 2012--NVIDIA and ZTE today announced the ZTE Mimosa X, the first smartphone to be powered both by the NVIDIA ®Tegra ® application processor and its Icera® modem, which came to NVIDIA through its Icera acquisition in mid-2011.

"The ZTE Mimosa X is exciting for a few reasons," said Michael Rayfield, General Manager of the Mobile business at NVIDIA. "The Mimosa X marks the first time NVIDIA technology powers all the major processors in a single smartphone, and also the first time a premium mobile computing experience is coming to the mainstream smartphone market."

Way back near the end of September I personally added an extra piece of information to a widely reported ZTE T98 tablet. This piece of information was that it appeared to be a Vodafone bound tablet. Now we jump forward to an hour just past midnight local time where I find myself casually browsing through Vodafone's coming soon section and I see something that looks familiar to that same tablet I posted about those months ago.

Further digging showed that perhaps the original leak may have been incorrect or this is a slightly different tablet. The original T98 tablet had a Tegra 3 chipset while the Smart Tab will have a Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 series chipset (as proposed by the Qualcomm image on the Vodafone international website.) In addition to that there is now a 10 inch version that is identical in every way except for the screen size.

The Chinese manufacturer ZTE made some waves with their smartphones at the Mobile World Congress last month in Barcelona. They've done it again but this time with tablets. It's been confirmed that 2 ZTE tablets will hit the market in the second half of the year. The tablets include a 7" and a 10" model. The 10" model which was announced at MWC was rumoured to only pack a 1Ghz processor. ZTE have corrected this and stated that the 10" tablet will have a 1.2Ghz processor, a screen resolution of 1280 x 800, and will run Android 3.0 Honeycomb. This puts the tablet in direct competition with the likes of Motorola, LG and Samsung. Knowing ZTE, the tablets will be priced competitively to capture the part of the market that's currently being ignored by the big players. The 7" tablet will have a 1Ghz processor, 800 x 480 screen resolution, and will release with Android 2.2 (Froyo). 

Hu Jintao the current leader of the People's Republic of China would certainly have heard of ZTE. The Chinese manufacturer are the fourth largest mobile phone vendor in the world according to IDC, although much unknown in common Western markets, they are huge in China, obviously, and offer budget Android handsets in Africa and Latin America. Capturing a market often neglected by the big smartphone players. Building on their 2010 momentum, ZTE used MWC 2011 to show their new 4.3in Android offering, the ZTE Skate.

Although it boasts a 4.3in screen, the 800MHz CPU and 200MHz GPU won't be rivalling the Desire HD for like-for-like performance. More than likely this will come in as a budget offering, opening up the Android platform to a wider audience, something that HTC has tried with the Wildfire, but I think failed miserably.