A recent rumour had hinted that Lenovo was planning to collapse the ZUK brand and instead focus its smartphone business under the Moto brand. The company had debunked such rumours but it has continued to fester and the recent redirecting of the Lenovo China official website to Motorola.com.cn only fuelled the rumours.

From the look of things, there may be more to it than meets the eye. For one, Lenovo may indeed have rested its smartphone brand as the Lenovo and ZUK websites both redirect to Motorola.com.cn. The new website contains a link to navigate to Lenovo’s official China website where only laptops, tablets, Smart home gadgets, printers etc, are exhibited for sale excluding mobile phones.

But Lenovo former VP and presently CEO of the ZUK brand seems to have hinted via his Weibo page that the ZUK Z3 may be coming. The CEO had posted an interesting piece where he hinted that the company will be having 4 different events in the space of three months, precisely between July and September. The post attracted lots of comments with one particularly asking if the ZUK Z3 is coming and Chang Cheng’s response was affirmative. Although subsequent response by the CEO may not have been very explicit, he did not in anyway disclose that the brand is dead. But one uncommon thing we noticed is that he was shown as blogging from a Galaxy S8 smartphone.

Read More: The 6GB RAM ZUK Edge Gets A Huge Price Cut, Down To ¥1799 (~$264)

The ZUK Z3 is supposed to be the next ZUK mobile phone we’d be seeing. Recent rumours point at the Z3 coming as ZUK Z3 Nax, powered by the unannounced Snapdragon 836, 8GB RAM and 256GB storage. We are not so sure the rumour is fake. The likely turn of event is that Lenovo may have divested from ShenQi, the company which Lenovo invested in to make it the parent company of ZUK. So, it is possible ZUK mobile will be introducing its smartphones as an independent brand. Whatever it is, we expect to see four launch events within the next three months as hinted by the CEO. Until then, we’ll be on the look out for more details on this because the last has definitely not been heard.

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ZUK CEO Chang Chen had revealed a few days back that the company was going to release a new flagship in the month of May, which would be called as the ZUK Z2. A surprise feature of the new ZUK handset was expected to be the Samsung Exynos 8890 chipset inside. However, after seeing the first teaser for the upcoming handset, we were all disappointed. The teaser showed that the phone was going to come with a Snapdragon chip inside. Then, we speculated that there could be a version which runs on Exynos 8890. But that’s probably not going to happen, given that ZUK Z2 has just passed through the TENAA certification website and it basically confirms the presence of Snapdragon 820 on board.

Before we move on to the specs, let’s take a look at the design of the handset. Not much will be different than the ZUK Z2 Pro version, except for the screen size, which is now reduced to 5-inches, instead of 5.2-inch on the Pro and the camera placement at the back, which is now on the top left corner instead of the center.

As for the specs, the ZUK Z2 model will feature the Snapdragon 820 chip clocked at 2.15GHz with two memory variants, 3GB + 32GB and 4GB + 64GB. The display will be of 5-inches with 1080p resolution. At the back, the phone will have a 13MP sensor while up front, you will find an 8MP shooter. The battery is decent, with a capacity of 3500mAh. The phone seems to be running on Android 6.0.1 version out of the box and comes with 4G LTE and dual-SIM dual standby support.

There is no mention of Exynos 8890 anywhere on TENAA, and we wonder why CEO mentioned this chip while talking about this new device. Another important question will be, how many of the unique features of the ZUK Z2 Pro will be retained by this model, which is expected to be cheaper. It is said that the phone will start at 1799 Yuan ($274).

ZUK Z2 will be officially unveiled on May 31. Stay tuned for details.

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