Alcatel One Touch, owned by Chinese manufacturing company TCL, plans to release some of its new Android smartphones in the US market during the second half of the year. Nicolas Zibell, Alcatel’s president of the Americas and pacific, confirmed “we are going to increase our presence in smartphones in a significant way with Tier 1 carriers”.

Alcatel introduced three new families of Android phones at the CES show in Las Vegas: the dual-core 1.2GHz Idol, the 5-inch display Scribe, and the prepaid Pop. In addition to its new Android devices, Zibell said in 2013 Alcatel will introduce devices running Mozilla’s Firefox OS: “The key element of our strategy is to grow not only our global volumes but to grow our global volumes in the smartphone segment.”

FierceWireless: Alcatel One Touch promises U.S. smartphones by second half of 2013; TelecomTV content partner.