When it comes to big sticks to show your intent and scare the opposition, there's nothing bigger or stick-er in games than Epic's Unreal 3 Engine. Used in titles from Gears of War to Army of Two to Mass Effect, it's what people in the know like to refer to as the industry's 'de facto standard' middleware.

But even so, we'd not ever heard of a company licensing it to make a mobile game. Until TechFaith, that is.

Not well known in the west, it's one of China's biggest smartphone design companies (or as it calls itself, an original developed product provider). But it wants to expand.

It's recently set up a mobile content division, with the aim of making online gaming content for the Chinese and international markets. In time, it also hopes it can get involved in providing what it refers to as 'professional game terminals' and 'wireless game terminals'.

We'd call them handheld gaming devices. These will be either be Windows Mobile-based or ultra small PCs based on Windows Vista or XP.

And it's this division, TechFaith Tech-Interactive Ltd, that's licensed the Unreal 3 Engine.

"As we commence with our gaming strategy, we continue to believe this sector has strong growth potential. Mobile phone games should serve as an excellent springboard to begin penetrating the broader mobile content sector," said Defu Dong, TechFaith's CEO. "Our progress will help us to capture the potential for our future in the mobile phone gaming space."

Of course, whether we ever see such games or devices in the west is open to question but as a business move, licensing Unreal certainly underlines Techfaith's determination to do something very different.