Is bigger better in smartphones?

Lenovo, which operates its global executive headquarters in Morrisville, is about to find out.

On Tuesday night at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the world’s top PC maker based on some statistical measures introduced a colossal phone that in Lenovo’s words “packs it all in.” That slogan refers to features.

Lenovo is stepping up its efforts to sell smartphones worldwide in a big way – with the K900 Ideaphone also known as the Rendezvous. It’s equipped with a new Intel mobile chip.

The phone also features a 5.5-inch screen. The newest iPhones from Apple, meanwhile, feature a 4-inch screen.

It’s also thin at 6.9 millimeters. That’s the thinnest model in this class of phone, Lenovo says. And the Rendezvous is just one of numerous new products Lenovo announced at CES.

However, Lenovo has no immediate plans to sell the phone in the U.S. The company, which sees smartphones as a crucial part of its strategic growth plan in selling Internet-capable devices, sells phones in China and a handful of other countries but a U.S. launch is not anticipated for some time.

The phone doesn’t lack features.

The K900 will work on a new Intel dual-core version of its Atom processor, the company said. The phone will be sold in Asia, part of Lenovo’s effort to capture the attention of consumers there who are upgrading to their first smartphones.

“Like our PCs, we’re going to grow in faster-growing markets first,” said Nick Reynolds, a Lenovo director of marketing and strategy. “In 2013, we’re going to bring new markets online. We’re going to do it with a new phone.”

Lenovo, the second-largest smartphone seller in China, behind Samsung Electronics Co., more than doubled sales at its mobile Internet and digital-home unit in the first half of 2012. The decision by the Chinese company to use Intel is a step forward in the chipmaker’s effort to gain a foothold in phones, a market that’s growing faster than PCs, where its technology dominates.

“With the K900, our team has broken down the key functions of the smartphone and redesigned them from the ground up,” said Liu Jun, president of Mobile Internet Digital Home, and senior vice president for Lenovo. “Rather than focus on specifications that look good on a datasheet, we’ve zeroed in on what consumers want and proved that for smartphone users, top performance doesn’t require a thick profile. The K900 is a game-changer that looks as good as it performs.”

Santa Clara, California-based Intel has less than 1 percent of the market for phone processors, compared with more than 80 percent share in chips for PCs, a market that shrank last year for the first time in more than a decade. In addition to Beijing-based Lenovo, Intel has recruited Google Inc.’s Motorola Mobility, China’s ZTE Corp., India’s Lava International Ltd. and France Telecom SA’s Orange as phone-chip customers.

The new Lenovo K900 phone, based on a design by Intel, also has a 13-megapixel camera.

[LENOVO ARCHIVE: Check out seven years of Lenovo stories as reported in WRAL Tech Wire.]

(Bloomberg contributed to this report.)