The Sprint Vital smartphone, with a 5-in. display, goes on sale Friday for $99.99, after rebate and with a two-year service agreement, Sprint announced Monday.
The Sprint Vital smartphone.
The phone, manufactured by China's ZTE, runs Android 4.1.2 (Jelly Bean) and features high-end components including LTE wireless access, a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 1 megapixel front camera.
The phone's 5-in. display, at 1280 x 720 pixels, and a 2,500 mAh battery put the Vital in a category with many phones costing $200 or more.
Sprint boasted that the Vital strips down extra software for an "Android experience closer to the way it was intended ... with less clutter that could slow it down."
ZTE is an up-and-coming smartphone vendor and shipped 4.4% of the smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2012, IDC said, which put it fourth overall behind Samsung (29%), Apple (21%), and Huawei (4.6%). There were 227.8 million smartphones shipped in that quarter, IDC said.
ZTE is also prepping an Intel Atom Android smartphone, the ZTE Grand X2 for introduction in Europe in the third quarter of 2013.
This article, Sprint to sell Vital, a ZTE smartphone, for $100, was originally published at Computerworld.com.
Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld. Follow Matt on Twitter at @matthamblen or subscribe to Matt's RSS feed. His email address is mhamblen@computerworld.com.
See more by Matt Hamblen on Computerworld.com.
Read more about mobile/wireless in Computerworld's Mobile/Wireless Topic Center.