The Chinese smartphone market has flourished in recent years. Once upon a time, the phrase 'Chinese technique' was synonymous with 'junk'. Now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction.
Geeks have been familiar with Chinese brands for a long time, and now the trend has spread to ordinary buyers. First, every year more and more people appear around them, completely satisfied with the devices from China. Secondly, in recent years, many “Chinese” have officially entered our market. More ads and reviews, less warranty and purchase hassles. Thirdly, the increase in prices and the changed ruble exchange rate, which made many people think about whether it is worth overpaying for A-brands with a similar set of characteristics.
For many, the choice of a Chinese device has become a proof that the user is well versed in technology, knows how to count his money and is not engaged in advertising fashion brands. But not everyone understands that the Chinese are the Chinese. And the fact that smartphones Apple are also assembled in China does not guarantee the quality of the devices of the local company named after Uncle Liao.
Meanwhile, second-tier Chinese manufacturers quickly sensed where the wind was blowing. A bunch of laudatory reviews of small-town Chinese brands and a whole scattering of high-profile thematic news appeared on the Internet. And in the comments to any popular device of any brand, there will certainly be at least a couple of users who unobtrusively mention the next stunning ChinaPhone YZ.
Who is who
Without going into details, all Chinese manufacturers can be divided into three groups. The division is to a certain extent conditional, sometimes different people refer to the same company in different categories.
Buyer's guide. Understanding smartphone manufacturers – who is who
The first group is A-brands. Они тратят много сил и ресурсов на R&D, владеют кучей интересных наработок и патентов, имеют небольшой уровень брака и хороший контроль качества. Examples include Huawei or Lenovo \ Moto.
The second group is the so-called 'premium Chinese'. They take their toll primarily at the cost. To be more precise – the price / quality ratio. Perhaps they cannot compete with the flagships of A-brands, but they create very successful models in the middle and budget segment. Their marriage rate is slightly above average, and quality control is sometimes lame. But then there is a good hardware, interesting branded shells and there is no overpayment for the brand.
There is only one problem – such devices have won the love of “geeks” at a “Chinese” price. If you order them from China, the difference in cost with the 'white' A-brands is really fantastic. But the prices of PCT devices are no longer amazing.
Examples of such companies are Xiaomi or Meizu.
The third group is the Chinese of the second echelon. Here we have to talk not so much about the price / quality ratio as the price / expected characteristics. These devices may have a lot of various problems and shortcomings, a high level of defects and a complete lack of support – but they have an attractive price. Examples include companies such as Ulefone or UMIDIGI. This also includes the products of 'domestic' brands that stick their nameplates on the products of Chinese factories. Buying such machines is a game of roulette. Someone wins, someone loses, and only the casino itself never loses.
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It is about the latter that we will talk about in this article.
Underwater rocks
After smartphones Xiaomi went mainstream and went on sale, many geeks started looking for better new solutions. That is, smartphones that a) have impressive performance and b) are cheaper than the competition. Each sandpiper praises its swamp and even the most humble and little-known Chinese company has its own fan base.
Unfortunately, fans always talk more about the merits than the demerits. And having bought a smartphone, they will never admit that they made a wrong or suboptimal choice. When reading reviews on Chinese second-tier smartphones, one might get the impression that they have long been on the same step with Meizu, Xiaomi, or even Huawei. In fact, this is not nearly so yet.
Over the past year and a half, I have had about a dozen different second-tier “Chinese” in my hands. I used some for a couple of days, some for several months. Most of them had very 'tasty' characteristics on paper, but in life, things almost always turned out to be not quite so rosy.
Build quality
The main problem with second-tier Chinese manufacturers is poor quality control. Because of this, devices, even within the same batch, may have a different set of congenital ailments. This primarily concerns the build quality.
Geeks traditionally scold monoblocks with non-removable batteries, but for Chinese B-brands this is more a plus than a minus. A couple of years ago, when thin plastic covers were in vogue, fastened to the case with thin latches, there were much more problems with assembly. Cracks, creaks, cracked plastic 'tabs' were a real problem. Now, when most manufacturers have switched to candy bars, poor build quality is expressed mainly in the backlash of the power and volume keys. It’s unpleasant, but it’s quite possible to survive.
Screen
We rarely think about the obvious. And sometimes it goes sideways to us. The screen is something that will always be in front of your eyes, but when choosing a smartphone, it is often given almost the last place. Of all the characteristics, they usually look only at its resolution and ppi value, dismissing everything else. But in vain.
When buying the flagship A of the brand, you can really not pay attention to details such as color gamut, viewing angles and matrix types. Geeks can talk as much as they want about the benefits of 4K displays when using VR, aesthetes can savor the peculiarities of matrix types, and haters can complain about terrifying graininess AMOLED. But the overwhelming majority of buyers will be completely satisfied with the picture quality in any case. And it is far from a fact that even with a direct comparison of different screens, it will notice any difference.
Considering the purchase of a budget Chinese, it is better to forget about this approach right away. Tough competition in the Middle Kingdom leads to the fact that B-brands are trying to save on every penny. Don't be in a hurry to rejoice that the smartphone specifications indicate a surprisingly high resolution. Most likely, the manufacturer decided to recoup on something else. And you almost certainly won't like it.
What you should pay attention to?
Brightness margin. Either this problem has faded into the background in recent years, or I was just lucky with the devices. But working in the sun with most of the budget “Chinese” was possible without any problems. In any case, there is little pleasant in this, but at maximum brightness the image at least remained readable.
Viewing angles. Many users like to say that poor viewing angles of the display are a problem for those trying to look over their shoulder. But in reality, everything is not so simple. Even if you do not take into account the joint viewing of photos and other such things. When, at the slightest tilt of the smartphone, the picture starts to sparkle in different colors – it's not very cool.
Looking at the screen Ulefone Metal, one of my friends asked in all seriousness where I found this beautiful live wallpaper with cool iridescent colors. I had to disappoint him and explain that the wallpapers on the screen are the most ordinary ones. And for the 'cool overflows' you need to thank an exclusively economical manufacturer.
Smartphone Review Ulefone Metal
Color rendering. Manufacturers often try to hide display flaws by twisting its parameters one way or the other. Someone, like LeEco, focuses on proprietary color profiles, assuring that such display settings are as practical and beneficial to the eyes as possible. Even if black begins to look like gray and cold tones begin to prevail in the colors. Some, on the contrary, are trying to impress users with a 'bright and juicy picture', which is easiest to call in one word – acidic. And someone simply does not waste time on such 'nonsense' as high-quality display calibration, offering users to correct the picture quality on their own. Fortunately, the possibility of manual color calibration has long been a surprise.
Matrix type. It was once believed that IPS is synonymous with natural color rendering, and AMOLED necessarily means a 'bright and juicy' picture in the style of 'pluck your eyes out'. At first, the owners of different devices argued until hoarse about which approach was better. So far it has not turned out that this is not so much a question of the type of matrix as the features of the factory calibration. Today, when talking about AMOLED screens, buyers do not keep in mind the 'acidic' palette, but energy savings when displaying dark colors and additional features a la Always On mode.
For the 'Chinese' of the second echelon AMOLED, the display is still a reason to boast of twisted levels of saturation and contrast. It is also better not to rely on alternative color profiles – usually their quality is somewhere on the level of the baseboard. If juicy colors are your thing, then the 'Chinese' with AMOLED display is a good choice. If not, you may face big problems. As for additional features like Always On Display, you will almost certainly not get anything like this in a budget 'Chinese'.
Why is it important?
You may never feel the disadvantages of a processor that scores slightly fewer “parrots” in tests than competitors. Don't notice the difference between 3 and 4 GB of RAM. Do not pay attention to the lack of a couple of specific features that appeared in the latest versions of the OS. But any imperfections of the screen will catch your eye as long as you use the new device.
I definitely prefer to sacrifice the screen resolution for the sake of a better matrix. Than to endure disgusting color rendering, minimum viewing angles and other 'little things' before buying a new device. Practice has shown that it is much easier for me to adapt to not the most outstanding ppi value than to the same 'acidic' palette. But this is my personal choice.
Camera
Image quality is one of the things where the difference between A and B brands is most pronounced. The reason for this is not even so much hardware as software.
For example, dual cameras have become popular lately. Chinese companies are happy to support the trend and have released many affordable dual camera devices. Only in half of the cases they simply do not work there. Formally, these smartphones support a kind of blurred background and often boast of an extended dynamic range. But in practice, this is done exclusively by software methods, while the second camera is not involved at all in any way. On some devices it can be glued or closed with a finger, and the smartphone itself will not even notice it.
Chinese companies are generally very fond of throwing dust in their eyes. At any presentation, you can hear that the presented novelty shoots better than the last one iPhone. To begin with, users are shown test shots in which a rootless 'Chinese' really puts smartphones Apple on both shoulder blades. And then they dump a bunch of sonorous marketing terms on their heads that don't explain anything, but sound solid.
One must immediately understand that such miracles happen only in fairy tales. A cheap “Chinese” will never shoot at the level of top smartphones, and it is absolutely pointless to compare him with them. The camera of a budget smartphone does not require a mythical photo quality, but the absence of serious flaws. When reading reviews and viewing test images, you need to pay attention not to the advantages of the camera, but to its disadvantages.
'Premium Chinese' like Xiaomi have been doing well with this in recent years. The devices Redmi do not grab stars from the sky, but on the other hand they consistently produce images with a slightly above average quality. The key word is 'stable'.
The “Chinese” of the second echelon often cannot boast of such stability. What are individual good shots worth when the camera has constant autofocus or white balance problems? When two-thirds of the pictures are hopelessly spoiled by crooked software, the quality of the rest does not really care.
When choosing a camera, I would pay special attention to the HDR mode. In cloudy weather and under artificial lighting, the quality of images drops even with expensive devices. And the most successful shooting conditions are traditionally considered a bright sunny day. This is where the main problem of many budget cameras manifests itself – a narrow dynamic range. Half of the image is too light, the other half is too dark.
In theory, HDR should solve this problem. It is present in almost every smartphone these days, but it works very differently. Somewhere the pause between the first and second frames takes a couple of seconds, which is why most of the pictures are blurry. Somewhere too aggressive image processing algorithms are used, which makes the final image look too bright and unnatural.
An example of an HDR implementation 'curve' is the UMIDIGI Z1 Pro. Due to too high brightness, frames in this mode are faded and faded.
Smartphone Review UMIDIGI Z1 Pro
Performance
Scores on synthetic performance tests are great. But the performance of the budget “Chinese” depends more on the work of the software than on the number of cores and gigahertz. Putting the number of 'parrots' at the forefront is only if you like to play games. Although here, too, much depends on their optimization for a specific hardware. Or rather, on the popularity of the chipset used in the smartphone.
As for the daily work, then everything is decided by software optimization. If the 'premium Chinese' try to use their own branded skins, then their colleagues from the lower divisions prefer the conditionally clean Android with a number of additional options and alterations. Usually such a Frankenstein does not work very well, periodic slowdowns and glitches are guaranteed regardless of the chosen iron.
I can use budget devices Xiaomi \ Meizu \ Asus for a long time without any problems. Perhaps they do not have the highest screen resolution and by no means top-end hardware – but after a couple of days you get used to all this and stop paying attention. After all, a few years ago, such characteristics were considered quite flagship for themselves, and this did not bother anyone. With the “Chinese” of the lower echelons in this regard, everything is much more complicated. Periodic application crashes, slowdowns and glitches do not allow you to forget that you are holding a budget smartphone. And here it is impossible to get used to it.
Over the past couple of years, it has become fashionable to add extra gigabytes of RAM to a smartphone. This increases the prime cost of the device, but allows it to stand out favorably against the background of more famous competitors. The user will almost certainly notice an additional gigabyte of “RAM” in the list of characteristics, but he may not pay attention to such trifles as LTE bands, Wi-Fi operating modes or an NFC sensor. In practice, most owners will not really feel the difference between 3, 4 and 6 gigabytes of memory. It is definitely not worth buying a little-known Chinese just for these reasons.
Battery life
The situation is exactly the same with the battery life. Unlike A-brands, the “Chinese” do not hesitate to install batteries from 4000 mAh and above into their devices. And this is really great. But a capacious battery does not always mean a record battery life. With a typical scenario of use and a couple of hours of screen operation, almost any device will survive until the end of the day. But if you want more, you need to carefully read the reviews and study the test results, and not be content with a dry list of characteristics.
Nowadays it is customary to measure the working time by watching HD video. This is not always great; during everyday use, the smartphone may show completely different results. But this is at least some kind of starting point that speaks of battery life more than battery capacity.
Localization
In most cases Android 'out of the box' will support the Russian language. But this only applies to native menus and options. Anything that Chinese engineers added on their own will remain in English or will be provided with a machine translation.
Some devices may not have Google services or have a bunch of incomprehensible Chinese software, but this has not happened very often lately. Apparently, Chinese companies have become cramped in their home market, and they are beginning to navigate, including buyers from other countries.
Updates and support
Never expect a second tier manufacturer to fix something in the future. If the dual camera only has one module working, do not hope that this is a bug that will be fixed with a patch. If the device has an old version of the OS, don't expect it to be updated in six months or a year. If your smartphone has a low battery life due to optimization problems – don't dream that they will be solved later.
It does happen sometimes. But rarely. Therefore, if the smartphone does not suit you in the form in which it is now, it is better just not to buy it.
Additional features
A lot depends on what kind of device you had in your hands before. Such things as dual-band Wi-Fi with support for the 802.11ac standard, a fingerprint scanner, NFC module, fast charging and other 'chips' are not an obligatory attribute of a good 'budget employee'. But if you had them on your previous smartphone, then it can be difficult to refuse them. And the absence of one single familiar detail can ruin the whole impression of the device.
But what you need to pay attention to is the set of supported frequencies. The coveted LTE inscription in itself does not mean anything, in fourth-generation networks the smartphone may not work or work poorly. In Russia and Europe 'bands' 3, 7, 20, 38 are mainly used.
Outcome
Many geeks buy Chinese B-brands and are completely satisfied with them. But this choice should be made only with open eyes, having previously thoroughly studied the issue. A Chinese smartphone should never be an impulse purchase. It is not worth ordering simply because you came across a low price on the website of a Chinese online store. Or because the numbers in the list of characteristics are higher than those of the A-brands.
For those who do not see the difference between Xiaomi \ OnePlus \ Philips \ UMIDIGI \ Meizu \ Huawei \ Prestigio buying a rootless 'Chinese' just contraindicated. These companies have different weight categories, it is ridiculous to put them in one row only because of the country of origin. In most cases, it is better to buy a 'premium Chinese' for the same money or overpay for an A-brand. Even if his characteristics are slightly worse. For me personally, the border goes somewhere at the level Xiaomi, which produces more or less stable devices with the expected level of quality. Anything that is even one step lower is an unjustified risk for the sake of very dubious benefits. No matter how SMM agencies of some companies try to prove otherwise.