ZUK Mobile

» see zuk.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

ZUK Mobile was founded on 28 May 2015 as a deliberate spin-off from Lenovo's own smartphone business, with Chang Cheng running it out of Beijing. Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo's chief executive, described the investment as one of the company's major steps into the internet era and stressed that this was an independent brand rather than another Lenovo sub-label. In Chinese phone terms, that sentence meant one thing: they wanted a Xiaomi.

Less than two months after founding it signed an exclusive licensing deal with Cyanogen Inc., which let it ship a CyanogenMod-derived Android outside China and use the Cyanogen name. That is the detail that made ZUK briefly interesting to anybody who read phone forums, because Cyanogen was in the middle of its own attempt to become an operating system vendor and needed exactly this kind of partner. Inside China the same hardware ran ZUI, Lenovo's own skin.

The ZUK Z1 was unveiled in Beijing on 11 August 2015 at 1,799 yuan, with a 5.5 inch 1080p screen and a USB-C port at a time when the port was still worth putting on a slide. More than 1.5 million pre-orders came in over two days in mainland China. The Indian launch followed on 10 May 2016 at 13,499 rupees, sold in Amazon flash sales, and the first one moved 25,000 units.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the phone ~

Four devices, counting generously. The Z1 in 2015, the Z2 Pro unveiled in April 2016 at 2,699 yuan, the smaller Z2 that followed it, and the ZUK Edge in December 2016. There was also a transparent prototype shown off at the Z1 launch, powered down and nearly bezel-free, a standard move for a new Chinese brand in 2015 buying itself a news cycle.

A ZUK Z3 was rumored into 2017 with a Snapdragon 836 and 8 GB of RAM, and it stayed a rumor. The Edge was the last phone the brand shipped, and after December 2016 there was nothing at all.

~ the skin that survived ~

Lenovo never put out a proper obituary. On 27 April 2017 Sina Tech published what an insider had told them, that ZUK would stop operating and have its team folded into Moto, and noted that Lenovo had announced nothing officially and that the ZUK category was still sitting in the Lenovo phone mall, probably to clear stock. The strategy behind it was already on the record from the previous November, when Yang told an earnings briefing that Moto would be Lenovo's only future smartphone brand.

The actual switch-off is dated to the week of 25 July 2017, when ZOL reported that the ZUK phone site had been formally closed and replaced by the official Moto site, the forum having already been redirected into the Lenovo community. ZUI did not die with it. Lenovo kept the skin and made it the system on Chinese-market Moto handsets, so the software outlived the hardware brand that paid for it.

~ two years and four phones ~

None of this reached Turkey. ZUK sold in China and India with a brief appearance in Dubai, and the Cyanogen arrangement that might have carried it further collapsed along with Cyanogen. What I followed from here was that end of it, because a custom ROM going legitimate was worth watching if you had ever flashed one, and ZUK happened to be the hardware partner standing next to that experiment.

ZUK was also not Lenovo's first amputation. VIBE and Lemon had both been cut before it, leaving Moto as the only phone brand the company still wanted to spend money on. Running three at once in one market was the stated problem, and ZUK was the youngest of the three, with the least recognition to defend.

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