Earlier this year, China’s Huawei Technologies was trying to sell a portion of its mobile-devices unit to a U.S.-based firm in order to gain some momentum for entering the North American market, but after it failed to get enough interest, there’s signs that the company is still moving forward. It now plans to enter the smartphone global market in the first half of 2009 by building phones based off of the Symbian and Android operating systems. Huawei told TotalTelecom at a briefing in Shenzhen that it will use the two platforms to customize handsets for individual operator partners. “Windows Mobile is already well supported by a number of software developers, but with Android and Symbian we can demonstrate our own customisable software and services,” said James Chen, Huawei’s director of marketing for its terminals business.

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Huawei says they see an opportunity even with a struggling economy. “We do see the spending of operators and customers decreasing… but for Huawei this is also an opportunity,” Chen said. “Subscribers will turn to vendors which are offering higher quality and better services at a lower cost. We still believe we can achieve progress in this unfavourable environment.”