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Phone maker ZTE has announced it will introduce a high-end Android phone supporting NFC at next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The phone, the PF200, will run the latest version of Android, 4.0, dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich, and will support the 4G technology LTE. A press release from ZTE today also announced a second Android-based LTE smartphone, the N910, but the phone maker did not say this model would support NFC.

China-based ZTE, which reportedly ranked as the fourth largest supplier of mobile handsets worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to U.S.-based research firm Gartner, did not disclose what type of secure elements the PF200 will support. It also did not say when the smartphone would be released or its pricing.

NXP Semiconductors announced at last year's Mobile World Congress that ZTE would use its PN544 NFC chip. If the PF200 uses the PN544, then the phone would support a single-wire protocol connection between the NFC chip and SIM slot, enabling SIM cards to run secure NFC applications, such as payment.

ZTE is expected to be gearing up to release more NFC-enabled smartphones, including low-end Android devices. Besides NXP, Inside Secure has also announced ZTE as a customer for NFC chips. But the PF200 likely uses an NFC chip from NXP, which has supplied all Android NFC phone makers with their NFC chips to date.

With Ice Cream Sandwich, the PF200 would be able to support Android Beam, an enhanced peer-to-peer NFC feature Google has introduced for Android. 

The only other NFC phone from ZTE yet disclosed is believed to be a lower-end NFC-enabled Android handset put on sale last month by Turkey’s largest operator, Turkcell. The telco branded the phone the T11 for its mobile wallet, Cep-T Cüzdan. It’s a follow-up to Turkcell’s T20 Android NFC phone made by Chinese phone maker Huawei.

ZTE in its announcement today said the PF200 will also sport a 4.3-inch touch screen, 8-megapixel camera, WiFi and A-GPS functionality. It indicates the phone will pack a 1.2-gigahertz processor.

The two new LTE devices ZTE announced today will be the first of many supporting the 4G network technology, said the device maker, though it did not mention how many of these would support NFC.