Doing Business in China

3g phones named ophone in China to release first next month.Lenovo Mobile next month aims to release China's first 3G phones named "Ophone," the name for handsets with the China Mobile operating system, a Lenovo Mobile representative said Friday. The handset will support TD-SCDMA (Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access), a domestically developed 3G standard that the government has tapped China Mobile to promote and market.

The Lenovo phone, called the O1, will be the first to use both technologies, according to the company. It will also add a sleeker 3G phone to China Mobile's offerings, combating the lack of attractive handsets that analysts say has helped keep down adoption of TD-SCDMA. The Lenovo Web sites promoting the phone play either trance techno beats or smooth acoustic tunes to back up pictures of the black handset, which displays applications in iPhone-like bubble squares on its 3.5-inch touchscreen.

China Mobile, the world's largest carrier, needs the boost to its 3G service. Fewer than 3 percent of its new subscribers signed up for TD-SCDMA during the first five months of the year, according to a China Mobile filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Limited network coverage is another reason for the slow adoption, said Liu Ning, an analyst at BDA, a telecoms research company in Beijing. Expanding coverage and a growing number of handsets will help the carrier, but it still faces a challenge in reaching government targets for the growth of TD-SCDMA, he said.

China Mobile is competing with the country's two other state-run operators, China Unicom and China Telecom, to attract 3G users.