ZUK Z1 International Variant with Cyanogen OS 12.1 Announced for $299

Lenovo’s latest sub-brand ZUK has debuted with the ZUK Z1 smartphone earlier in China. Today the company announced the international variant for $299. The ZUK by Lenovo is the counterpart for the Xiaomi’s dominance in the low-cost online only sale devices. The ZUK Z1 also got some impressive specifications at least on the paper as of now. As per the company’s social media post, the device will be launched in the mid-October.

There are no differences between the International variant and the Chinese variant apart from the OS, while the Chinese variant runs on ZUI the international variant comes powered by Cyanogen OS 12.1. For Cyanogen this their big third deal with smartphone manufacturers only next to OnePlus and Micromax backed YU Televentures.

Like the Honor devices, the ZUK Z1 also opted out for having a logo of their parent company, you can find only the ZUK logo on the rear of the device. Coming to the specifications, the device sports a 5.5-inch Full HD (1920×1080) IPS display with a pixel density of 401ppi. It is powered by 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 MSM8974AC quad-core processor coupled with Adreno 330 GPU and 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM.

Earlier, it is rumored that the ZUK Z1 will be powered by the latest 64-bit Snapdragon 810 processor, but the indeed the company opted for 2014’s Snapdragon 801 processor. It has 64GB of internal storage out of which only 53.6GB will be available to the end user, and there will be no microSD card slot on this device.

It has the USB Type-C 3.0 port that has ten times more transmission speed than the 2.0 port on OnePlus 2. The device features a fingerprint sensor embedded into the physical home button called as U-Touch. The U-Touch supports different gestures integrated into the ZUI.

There is a 13MP rear camera with OIS and dual LED flash, on the front it comes with an 8MP OmniVision OV8865 sensor. It has a non-removable battery of 4,100mAh capacity that can give 38 hours of talk time and can last up to 526 hours on standby.

It is a dual SIM device with 4G LTE support. The other basic connectivity features include Wi-Fi, 3G, GPS, GLONASS, and Bluetooth 4.1. The device measures 155.7 x 77.3 x 8.9 mm and weighs about 175 grams. It is available in the colors – White and Deep Space Grey.  According to the company, there are over two million pre-orders placed for ZUK Z1 in China within just one week.

The International variant was little costlier at $299, where the Chine variant is priced at $285. The devices will be sold in Asia-Pacific, Europe, Middle East and America from the mid-October. ZUK is looking to partner with Amazon to sell the devices internationally and also working closely with the local online retailers to sell the device at a retail cost of $299. We will let you know once the device is available in India, until then stay tuned!

Full Comparison: ZUK Z1 VS OnePlus 2