HiQQ, Tencent's Smart Phone Manufactured by Huawei

Early today, Huawei and Tencent announced its strategic partnership at Huawei’s new product press conference in Beijing. These two giants (one on hardware, one on software) revealed a new (Android-based) smart phone, called HiQQ (source).

HiQQ pre-installs 19 classic Tencent’s mobile applications such as Mobile QQ, mobile QZone, QQ Browser, QQ Farm (social game), QQ Weibo (microblogging), QQ Security guard etc. HiQQ has two models, U8500 for China Unicom and C8500 for China Telecom. The price for both models is set to around rmb1000, an affordable price for QQ’s major users.

The most interesting feature comes with HiQQ is the its contact management. According to this, all the phone contacts can be linked with their QQ account, which means you would be able to see if your contacts are online on QQ or  not. and HiQQ also runs a service named QQ service which is used to manage all the QQ applications, e.g. auto-update.

Not sure how Tencent or Huawei is going to sell this phone, but it reminded me of Taobao’s branded phone. Is it going to be a trend for big Internet companies to work with manufacturers for highly customized phones?