Good old Chinese smartphones… always cheap and often even more ridiculous than their negligible price tag. Everyone can rely on a Chinese smartphone not to be reliable. Right? Well, if you subscribe to the mindset above, this article will show you your reasoning is out of date and plain wrong.
Most people are familiar with the low cost iPhone knock-offs that have spawned furiously from the East over the past half decade. What everyone does not know is that in the past year or so, they’ve started to get things right. Nowadays, it is very possible to find much satisfaction and outstanding cost effectiveness by choosing the right Asian brand phone.
For some examples, look up models such as Jiayu G4
– all of these are fully featured quad-core Android phones with a price tag under $300.
When did Chinese smartphones ascend from the low-level garbage pile they used to consistently pertain to? The answer is not entirely clear or even relevant for the purpose of this article. What we want to show you here is just why these smartphones are now offering a great deal for those who can use one. Here are the biggest reasons why:
Carrier-Free
All white-brand Asian smartphones are by definition carrier free, which can be a blessing for those who are tired of being chained to their phone carrier’s ludicrous contracts and data caps.
Dual SIM
If you think there is no point in having a dual SIM in your phone, you should consider that the second slot can be used not only to house a secondary voice card — but alternatively to hold in a 3G card, for cheap unlimited Internet. Does that sound useful to you?
Full Android
If you’re looking for a phone that offers a pure Android experience and supports the latest versions of this Mobile OS, you won’t be disappointed with these phones. As an added bonus, some of these models are very much root-friendly… in fact; some are actually rooted by default.
Phabletous Screens
With screen sizes ranging from the average iPhone standard to the visually accommodating phablet territory, you can easily find an Asian phone matching your preference. If you’re picky about your pixel density and resolution, no worries: many of these phones feature a full HD screen which doesn’t fall too far behind the over-hyped retina screens in state of the art brand name phones.
Decent Production Values
Once upon a time, Chinese smartphone knock-offs were generally ill-conceived gadgets that seemed flimsy and unreliable. Nowadays, several manufacturers have learned their lesson – they now focus on producing smartphones that hold together properly, as opposed to blatant, soulless knock-offs of popular brands.
Unbeatable Price Tag
We’re talking about unlocked quad-core phones with Dual SIM, fully featured Android, 1 or 2 GB of RAM, up to 16GB ROM, micro-SD card expandable, 5” or over screen size… the full works.
In short, we’re talking about phones that can actually hold up with little shame next to a top of the line iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S4. And the price? When you pick the right Asian phone, you will spend as little as a half, or even one third of what it would cost to get a carrier-free brand name phone. You’ll be hard pressed to find an Asian white brand phone with a price tag over three hundred bucks (do remember we’re talking about carrier-free phones).
Quad-Core Chips
Most of these decent Chinese smartphones we speak of use the MTK6589 chip, which is big part of the reason why they’re such decent gadgets. Even though this quad-core Cortex a7 chipset is relatively unknown, it actually offers better performance than the super-popular Tegra 3 chipset.
In short, smartphones like the Jiayu G4, iOcean x7, Zopo C2 or the THL W200 will definitely surprise you by running any games you throw at them fluently, as well as performing buttery smooth in your everyday uses.
Here’s a comparison video that should offer some perspective:
Final thoughts: not all is roses?
If you’re read through this article, you should be almost sold to trying a white brand smartphone from Asia. But if you’re a savvy consumer (and if you’re reading this blog, we expect you to be), you’re probably wondering…”so what’s the catch?”
Are these phones so totally amazing, they make us realize that big brands like Apple and Samsung are effectively ripping us off to leverage their marketing budgets and assets, in order to further keep taunting us to throw our hard earned cash at them? Well… yes and no.
You see, it all comes down to attention to detail. As much as certain Chinese smartphones are extremely decent and offer an unbeatable deals in terms of cost-efficiency, they to have the occasional quirk. They don’t offer such comprehensive customer support as the top brand variants, and the build materials aren’t always quite as sturdy looking. All the bells and whistles are there, but if you have a pitch-perfect ear you may notice the occasional note is off. For example, a common problem with these phones is how sometimes the GPS won’t synchronize as promptly as you’d want, and that is actually the Achilles heel of the MTK6589 chipset, if there would ever be one.
Unless you’re completely bent over details or subject to brand-happy peer pressure, these shortcomings are really nothing to fret about. In fact, they aren’t anything you’ll particularly notice, unless you’re more worried about running your phone’s features through a fine comb, rather than, you know, actually using your phone.
If you just want a smartphone you can use to get things done without spending a lot of cash or worrying about performance, then you should try one of the following models:
