Ningbo Bird, China's leading handset maker, recently unveiled a self-developed fingerprint-identification smart phone which is expected to take the market share of its imported counterparts over two to three years, Friday's China Daily reported.

The smart phone, the first of its kind in China, was jointly developed by Bird, the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing-based Digital Fingerpass Technology Co Ltd. The phones also use Bird's self-developed embedded operating system.

The fingerprint, as a highly individual feature, is considered reliable enough to ensure information security, which makes the new technology very promising for e-business and e-government.

"As a self-developed technology, it will be particularly useful to e-government, which demands information security," said Jin Guangtao, Bird's vice-president.

The product will soon go into mass production, he added.

According to Zhao Jiandong, Bird's chief engineer, the company is the third in the world to develop such a phone.

The new model makes secure not only information stored in the phone itself, such as address books and messages, but also various wireless services accessed through handsets such as e-banking, e-shopping and online securities trading.

"Companies in South Korea and Japan developed fingerprint smart phones earlier, but their technology only enables the system to protect information stored in the phone," Zhao said.

China is the world's No 1 mobile phone producer, but most Chinese handset makers have no intellectual property rights (IPRs) to core technologies.

"But Bird has IPRs to two core technologies, and that is encouraging," said Ni Guangnan, an academic from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was also a member of the technological appraisal team for the new product.

So far Bird is the only Chinese handset maker that has developed an embedded handset operating system with intellectual property rights.

The company's domestic shipment of smart phones reached 500,000 units last year, with an estimated sales revenue of 1 billion yuan (120 million US dollars).