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TE Indonesia, a subsidiary of China’s second-largest telecommunication equipment maker ZTE Corporation, launched a series of three Android devices and a data card on Tuesday, responding to the Indonesian market challenge of affordable Android handsets.

ZTE Indonesia director of the device division Susanto Sosilo said that ZTE Android-based smart phones had helped push ZTE smart phone sales in Indonesia. “Up to 80 percent of ZTE terminal products sold in Indonesia were smart phones,” he said without elaborating.

Agus Hamonangan, the Indonesia Android Community founder, said that the Android market was growing fast with 550,000 Android devices activated daily world wide.

Susanto said ZTE has shipped 60 million terminal products worldwide in the first semester, of which 35 million were smart phones, a 400 percent year-on-year increase.

The firm aims to ship 12 million smart phones in the second half and said it was confident of beating its 2011 target of shipping 80 million mobile devices, according to Reuters.

The launched gadgets were the ZTE Light Plus Tab tablet, ZTE Blade and ZTE Freddo smartphones and the ZTE MF190 data card.

ZTE Freddo comes with the upgradable Android 2.2 Froyo OS, a 2.8-inch resistive full touch screen with a high-resolution QVGA TFT 262K color, 3-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, GPRS/EDGE, GPS and Google applications. It will be priced on the Indonesian market at Rp 999,000 (US$ 116.88).

Meanwhile, the ZTE Blade is reportedly one of the thinnest, lightest and bestselling smart phones in ZTE’s lineup. It uses the Android 2.2 OS and a 3.5-inch WVGA TFT capacitive touch screen display. ZTE said it also improved the technology of the ZTE Light Plus Tab, a further development of the ZTE Light Tab.

The newly launched products will be available for the Indonesian market by next week, Susanto said.

In the first quarter, ZTE, China’s only listed telecom manufacturer, was ranked the sixth-largest handset maker by unit shipments globally, after Nokia, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics Inc, Apple and Research In Motion, according to information technology research and advisory company Gartner. (swd)