NEW YORK — Off to the side of the cavernous Duggan Greenhouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard was a small display that Chinese smartphone company ZTE had set aside to tout the gaming and sports potential for the newly unveiled Axon M, which has a two-screen display that can be used to either extend the viewable real estate or run concurrent apps.
In other words, users can stream an NBA game while texting or tweeting or watch NFL games while monitoring one’s fantasy football stats without having to toggle back and forth between apps. Driving this innovation was research cited by ZTE that 68 percent of smartphone owners report “frequently” switching between multiple apps on their phone; thus, ZTE designed the Axon M’s dual functionality.
“We always keep consumers at the heart of everything we design,” ZTE’s North American CEO, Lixin Cheng, said, adding: “Today, ZTE is creating a completely new smartphone category.”
The new device will exclusively run on AT&T’s network and the tech giant’s senior vice president of device and network services marketing, Kevin Peterson acknowledged there are “interesting possibilities” for sports with this partnership, hinting that plans were already in the works although nothing was ready to be announced. AT&T acquired DirecTV and its sports-heavy offerings in 2015, which also include ownership of four regional sports networks (formerly the Root Sports consortium), so every Axon M comes pre-loaded with the DirecTV Now app.
Sports, after all, are a key part of ZTE’s heritage. By the company’s own accounting of its history, ZTE was a white-label manufacturer of phones before seeking to tag its own branding on the devices by “looking to sports sponsorships to grow consumer awareness, backing several NBA teams, and sponsoring teams in European club soccer and Australian rugby.” The turning point: Bill Wu, ZTE’s senior marketing director, met longtime NBA coach-turned-executive Don Nelson at a Dallas Mavericks charity event in the summer of 2012. Nelson, a former adviser to the Chinese national team, had signed the first China-born NBA player, Wang Zhizhi. That’s when, Wu wrote, “I also had an idea to help ZTE USA transition from a B2B to B2C brand through sports marketing.”
ZTE now sponsors four NBA teams — the Golden State Warriors, Houston Rockets, New York Knicks and Chicago Bulls, while previously having sponsored the Cleveland Cavaliers — and two players, Warriors superstar Stephen Curry and former Rockets guard, Patrick Beverley, who was traded to the Los Angeles Clippers this summer. Earlier this month, ZTE also became the “official smartphone” of the PGA Tour and individually backs two tour events, the Farmers Insurance Open and the RBC Canadian Open. Cheng, the CEO, is a regular attendee of NBA games and particularly has taken in a number of Golden State victories, so much so that Warriors CMO Chip Bowers reportedly told a Chinese-language publication, “Lixin is our lucky star.”
Capitalizing on the Axon M’s dual functionality for sports appears to be a natural fit given how fans increasingly seek a two-screen experience for viewing and a companion source of social media chatter, statistics or multi-tasking with email or anything else. With developers now having the chance to optimize apps for the two-screen phones, there are limitless possibilities for partners like the PGA Tour to provide two camera angles in its coverage — either centering on two golfers at different holes or one on the swing while the other provided simultaneous tracking of the approach from a vantage point at the green. And so on.
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Such a plan is only speculation for now. One of the few hints on Tuesday that sports are in ZTE’s plans was that one of the four large banners displaying multiple uses of the phone had both a football and a text message side by side. There’s no immediate indication that the market will embrace the foldable, two-screen smartphones but, if consumers provide the right incentive to sponsors and developers, sports fans may be among the key beneficiaries of this technology.