The myths of China mobile phones

The popularity of China Smartphones

iPhone 8 and Samsung are taking a beating in China as China Smartphones are gaining a strong foothold in the China market. Many of these manufacturers are adopting Android as the OS for their smartphone with heavy investment into making smartphone more responsive, nice looking and most importantly, bringing values to the market.

Huawei is defining the 5G smartphones, Vivo is focusing on selfie, Xiaomi is packaging as a system provider, Oppo is capturing the hearts of overseas marketing with its fluid experiences, Gionee is positioning to capture the hearts of the businessmen and Meizu is penetrating the value segment.  Other companies like Lenovo, Coolpad, 360, ZTE are also fighting to gain a footage in the competitive market.  Smaller companies are also struggling to survive rolling out phones with features such as weatherproof, bezeless, high battery capacity, 6GB or 8GB ram and dual camera.

In the midst of the competition, there are "traps" for consumers to fall into for a bitter experience.

Myth 1: More memory = Better performance

In the early days, iPhone is known to be lag free as compared to Android.  This is no longer true when Android OS is revamped and improved with 80% of smartphones sold in the market.

The simplest way to sell smartphone is to tout of its high memory as it is a well known fact that more memory (ram) is equivalent to less lag, therefore better performance. Premium smartphones are now sold with 6GB or 8GB ram built in to remove the doubts that there is no memory to run applications.

Ask yourself this: We know that the more rice we eat, the more energy we get.  How many bowls of rice produce more energy: 4 bowls or 40?  Definitely, the answer is 40 bowls.  But can our body digest 40 bowls of rice in one shot?  The diminishing marginal rate of return as our body is saturated after gaining enough energy.  Similarly, the phones cannot utilise the extra memory when there are limited apps.  To make matter worst, the apps cannot fully utilise the bandwidth of the memory thus making it run inefficiently.

So how many is enough? The magic number is 4GB when 6GB costs a bomb now. 

High benchmark does not mean better performance

Antutu is one of the popular benchmarking software and a high benchmark score implies the smartphone is better.  Manufacturers tend to place a premium price tag for high benchmark to justify the high performance.  The truth is high benchmark is achieved at the expense of power consumption and producing more heat.

Real life experience is more important than benchmark

Many are fooled by the promise of fastest cpu and ignore real life experiences.  Some premium phones with more memory and storage can run slower than those with less memory and storage due to different operation system and environment.  For example, Huawei's EUI is much fluid than many China OS who are not optimised.

More cores does not mean better performance

MTK 10 core processor has a fantastic benchmark but when executing instructions on single core, the other 9 processors cannot assist to expedite the process.

So what is the purpose of high benchmark and fastest cpu when most of the applications cannot fully utilize all the cores of the processor.  The processor can also run inefficiently with much heat thereby draining the battery life.

Bigger battery does not mean more standby time

Many China's smaller companies produced many phones with big battery capacity like 4,000 to 10,000 mAh.  However, raw battery life does not guarantee a good battery life.  In some cases, inferior batteries are used with poor setting which resulted in sudden drop of battery life from 30% to instant shutdown.  Effectively, the battery of a 4,000mAh is only operating at 70% or 2,800mAh.  This is disappointing as the promise of a high capacity battery is a fallacy.

Dual camera does not mean better quality. Fake camera

Do you know some dual-camera are fake?  You can try out by taking a picture with or without the second back len by blocking one of the lens completely.  Both photos produce identical image! Be mindful when you are promised with a dual camera in your next purchase.

Higher resolution camera does not mean better pictures

The pursuit of higher resolutions is common in those who are ignorant of the technicalities of a good smartphone camera.  Sensor and focal are more critical when considering a good camera.  High resolutions only produce big photo file size which consume more of the your limited storage space in your phone.

Full screen is not really full screen

The latest craze is the bezel-less phone which promises full screen effect.  Just like the fad and hype of 2.5D screen which not only serves as a beautiful vase but has no tangible feature in real life.  A true full screen has many compromises which tests greatly on the designer on antenna and circuit routing and bypasses.  You can only choose 2 out of the following 3 options - real full screen, good signal/GPS strength and good price.

Conclusions

There are many cracks in the selection of good China smartphones which has no standard by itself.  Some manufacturers even has spywares pre-installed to collect the surfing profile and information of the end-users.  The only consolation is consumers are getting smarter and by collective intelligence, inferior manufacturers will be eliminated by boycotting their new products.  We believe tomorrow will always be better than today.