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ByteDance-owned Smartisan launches new 5G smartphone, eyes education devices and software

  • The Smartisan team is also eyeing education hardware and software market
  • Smartisan launched its first smartphone under ByteDance in November last year, which gave users smoother access to Douyin

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A screenshot from the livestream to launch the new Smartisan-branded phone from ByteDance, October 2020. Photo: Screenshot
Iris Deng

TikTok owner ByteDance has launched a new 5G handset under the Smartisan brand, the smartphone maker it acquired last year, and said it plans to expand further into education hardware devices.

The Nut R2, already on sale, features a curved full screen and a 100MP lens, and runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 processor, according to a Tuesday evening launch event in Beijing, which was live-streamed online. The phone has a base price of 4,499 yuan (US$676).

Smartisan, which was a niche Chinese smartphone maker with a cult following, was acquired by Beijing-based ByteDance last year after it ran into financial trouble. Its debt-ridden founder Luo Yonghao, who was absent from the event last night, was later put on China’s ‘deadbeat’ social credit list in November for failing to pay off Smartisan’s debts.

“We are alive and well,” said Wu Dezhou, former CTO at Smartisan and now head of New Stone Lab, the hardware project under ByteDance, in response to public curiosity about the team’s fate.

Luo Yonghao. Photo: Sohu.com
Luo Yonghao. Photo: Sohu.com

The new phone received a mixed reaction on social media. A hashtag about the launch event on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter-like site, already has over 9 million views and some users complained about the pricing of the smartphone. “Smartisan is too confident with the high price,” one Weibo user wrote.

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