Lenovo

The company has also agreed to seek consumers' consent before installing any such software in the future.

Lenovo faced uproar when it emerged in 2015 that it had hidden an advert-delivering program made by Superfish on hundreds of thousands of computers.

It later provided a tool to remove it.

US Federal Trade Commission investigators have alleged that Lenovo first started selling compromised laptops in August 2014.

The software involved was called VisualDiscovery, and was made by the California-based start-up Superfish.

The new kit has been announced at the Ifa tech show in Berlin.

The idea is to add capabilities that are not currently built into handsets themselves.

But Sony's latest flagship phone also has new photography tricks of its own.

"It seems that people are holding on to their phones for longer, and, so, vendors are hoping to sell them extra things to add on," said Carolina Milanesi, a consumer tech analyst at Creative Strategies.

"And the camera is often the feature they use the most.

"But the price is critical.

The Chinese firm said its PC business had delivered "strong profits" despite a slowdown in the overall market.

However, revenue fell by 6% from a year earlier to $10.1bn in the three months to June.

Lenovo attributed that to the "challenging" environment and the decline in China's currency.

The Chinese firm has been aggressively cutting costs and investing in new growth areas such as cloud computing.