Lenovo Group Ltd is wading into the smartphone market with a thin, touchscreen device based on Google Inc's Android operating system, following the footsteps of PC rivals like Dell Inc and Acer Inc.

The world's No. 4 personal computer maker on Wednesday announced LePhone, which will be launched this year in China, Lenovo's home base, where it is the PC market leader.

LePhone has a 3.7-inch screen, is 12 millimeters thick and runs on Qualcomm Inc's Snapdragon chip. Lenovo did not provide details on pricing.

Lenovo has announced a new smartphone today called LePhone specifically for the Chinese WCDMA market. It has a really nice 3.7-inch 480x800 pixel display plus a completely touch-based interface for navigation -- no buttons here. It also boasts a 1 Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a 3.5-mm headset jack, 3G data, WiFi, A-GPS, plus a 3.0-megapixel camera and camcorder. The big news however is that the LePhone runs a specially customized version of Google's Android operating system which Lenovo is apparently calling the OPhone. It has integrated Twitter and Facebook applications plus an interesting proprietary 9-pin dock connector that lets you latch on an optional external keyboard