The Chinese market for Android is an exciting place to be right now. Chinese customers have the choice of imported Western handset made by manufacturers such as Samsung, HTC and Sony, or instead can opt for a device built by a domestic company such as Xiaomi, Huawei, Asus or ZTE. Local smartphones offer far more bang for the Chinese Yuan. Competition is especially intense at the 1,000 Yuam point, which is around $160 or £100. What I’m writing about today is a video comparison review of four of the hottest contenders at the 1,000 Yuan price point: the Xiaomi Red Rice Note, Huawei Glory Play, Asus Zenfone 5 and ZTE Red Bull V5.
[videofile width=”498″ height=”510″]http://player.youku.com/embed/XNzU3ODk4Njk2[/videofile]
There four handsets are compared here and all are available at under 1,000 Yuan and each represents that particular manufacturer’s take on what the perfect device should be. I’ll write about the Xiaomi Red Rice Note and Huawei Glory Play handsets first, as these have similar specification. The Note was released first followed by the Glory Play, which appears to be Huawei’s answer to the Xiaomi! Both are based around a 1.7 GHz octa core Mediatek with 2 GB of RAM and have either 8 or 16 GB of storage plus the MicroSD card slot. Both devices have a 720p resolution screen; the Xiaomi Note has a 5.5-inch screen and the Glory is a little smaller Both use a 13 MP rear facing camera and a 5 MP front facing camera.
The Asus ZenFone 5 is based around a dual core Intel Atom processor clocked at up to 2.0 GHz backed up by 1 GB of RAM rather than 2 GB. It makes do with a 720p 5.0-inch screen and an 8 MP rear camera. And finally, the ZTE Red Bull V5 where Chinese manufacturer also abandoned local manufacturer MediaTek and used a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.2 GHz quad core processor, a 13 MP rear camera and a 5.0-inch 720p resolution display. These latter two devices don’t have the same showroom appeal as a true octa core processor model but I believe it’s important to recognise that most applications (according to Qualcomm, 85% of applications used in the Chinese market only used one or two cores) will not utilise all of these cores. What will make a bigger difference is the clock speed of the Qualcomm processor, which at 1.2 GHz appears on paper to be quite a bit slower than the 1.7 GHz MediaTek design. The Qualcomm and MediaTek chipsets are both based around the ARM Cortex-A7 design so all being equal, the Red Rice Note and Glory Play will be more responsive handsets.