China Mobile, the country's largest mobile carrier, introduced two own-brand handsets on Friday, as a way to bring more affordable smartphones to its 740 million customers.
The phones are low-end models optimized to use the carrier's different wireless services. Both phones will launch later this month.
It's not the first time the carrier has tried to take more control of its handset products. In 2009, the company backed its own mobile operating system called OPhone that worked as a more localized version of Android. The OS, however, failed to gain traction in the Chinese market, and appeared on fewer and fewer phones over time.
In addition, China Mobile has struggled to draw customers to its 3G network. Only about 19 percent of its customers use the higher-speed network, depriving the carrier of revenue that could be earned by demand for more data services.
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