After comparing Apple to Hitler, Chinese company reveals Le Superphone.

Two weeks ago, to build buzz for the Android smartphone it announced today, Chinese tech company Letv turned to Hitler. A poster teasing the phone shows Hitler giving the Nazi salute while wearing an armband marked with the Apple logo. Apple, explained Letv CEO Jia Yueting in an accompanying post on Weibo, is an "arrogant regime" that has embraced "tyranny."

Jia quickly apologized for invoking Nazis to shill electronics, saying he meant only that "open-ended technology ecosystems are more beneficial to consumers." More beneficial than, say, Apple and Hitler, which respectively adopted policies requiring in-house vetting of mobile apps (in Apple’s case) and the systematic genocide of millions (in Hitler’s). As a brand disaster, Jia’s comments were unfortunate, but as content marketing they had their desired effect. Thousands of people around the world were introduced to fast-growing, loose-talking Letv, and anticipation for the company’s first smartphone shifted from nonexistent to "let’s see how it compares to Hitler."

BRAND DISASTER AS CONTENT MARKETING

At an event Monday evening in San Francisco, Letv (pronounced "L-E-T-V") introduced itself to the United States in the same awkward, lost-in-translation style it had used to bash Apple. A group of American and Chinese journalists gathered in a half-empty conference space in the Financial District, where an Letv-branded television delivered a stilted video transmission from Jia himself. "Hello US," he said. "Letv is coming."

JD Howard (left) and Mark Li

So what is Letv? Listening to Jia wasn’t much help; he described his $12 billion company as "an open, vertically integrated ecosystem for how content is distributed and experienced." So ignore that and instead think of Letv as a kind of Chinese YouTube that went public instead of selling to Google. Now imagine that YouTube had opened its own movie studio, and started manufacturing connected TVs so as to better market its video content. And then told you it was going to make an electric carand call it "the sixth screen."

A NAME PREVIOUSLY RESERVED FOR FRENCH ROLLER DISCOS

And finally, just as you were wrapping your brain around that, imagine YouTube threw a party announcing its arrival in a large foreign market, though none of its products would be for sale there for many months to come. That’s Letv in a nutshell. Its new device is called "Le Superphone," a name previously reserved for French roller discos of the late 1970s, and it’s going on sale in China today and America later this year.

Mark Li, a Letv vice president, and JD Howard, a former Lenovo executive who is running Letv’s international expansion, were tasked with introducing Le Superphone to America. "The smartphone industry is getting a little stale," Howard lamented. "It’s a little same-old, same-old." Ever since a certain never-mentioned smartphone re-fashioned the industry in its image, possibly using a combination of arrogance and tyranny, the world had delivered only incremental improvements.

Enter Letv. With 400 million monthly users of its streaming-video service, the company has "the experience, the creativity, and the ambition to disrupt in this space," executives told us. I girded myself for the knowledge bombs about to drop. "We’re not trying to be like everybody else here," Howard said. A slide behind him flashed a single word: Innovation.

The innovations mentioned on stage numbered three: a different kind of USB connector, a display with enhanced colors, and improved sound reproduction. They sounded like the sort of incremental improvements that Letv had just spent 20 minutes complaining about, but there were no phones to be seen, so I reserved my judgment for a while. I’m not a tyrant.

"WE'RE NOT TRYING TO BE LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE."

A Q&A followed, and I asked Li if he cared to elaborate on the similarities between Apple and Hitler. He declined, referring me instead to Jia’s previous apology. Instead, Li talked about opening a new office in Silicon Valley, from which Letv will seek content deals with American companies. A short while later, we moved to a second room to see Le Superphone — which I mentally pronounce in a cartoon Parisian accent — in action.