Smartisan is a Chinese smartphone manufacturer which released a rather interesting device back in May. Smartisan T1 is an extremely powerful machine and unfortunately Smartisan didn’t sell much of these devices for several reasons, more on that later. Smartisan just announced that it will significantly discount all version of that device starting at the end of this month, 30th of October is the date I believe. This discount matters to you only if you live in China, of course. Anyhow, current prices of Smartisan T1 are as follows: 16 and 32GB 3G versions costs 3000 and 3150 Yuan respectively, while the 32GB 4G version (which launched recently) costs 3500 Yuan. Starting at the end of this month, those prices will be 1980, 2080 and 2480 Yuan respectively, which are significant discounts as you can see. Smartisan said that there won’t be any more discounts until the T2 is launched and that the main reason behind poor sales numbers is the fact they weren’t able to meet the demand when the device first went on sale, they just didn’t have the production capacity to do so. I also believe that the device was priced a bit too high, it is a beast of a device if you look at the specs, but China is well-known for affordable handsets and competition is fierce, as you already know.
Smartisan T1 features a 4.95-inch 1080p (1920 x 1080) display protected by Gorilla Glass 3. The device is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 801 quad-core processor clocked at 2.5GHz and an Adreno 330 GPU for graphics processing. The T1 comes with 3GB of RAM and it is currently available in 16 and 32GB 3G variants, as well as 32GB 4G variant, as I mentioned earlier. As far as cameras are concerned, Sony’s Exmor RS 12.78-megapixel CMOS sensor with Fujitsu Milbeaut Mobile is located at the back of this device while there’s a 5-megapixel sensor on the front of the device (f/2.4 aperture). This device comes with the usual array of sensors and connectivity options, Bluetooth 4.0 LE, NFC, GPS, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n/ac, USB 2.0 and miracast are all accounted for. The device supports Hi-Fi mode with an embedded OPA2604 Operational Amplifier chip from Texas Instruments. This device was actually designed by an ex-Apple designer Robert Brunner. The T1 is based on Android 4.4 KitKat OS but it runs a custom Smartisan OS on top of it. Smartisan OS is actually an Android ROM which has been available for a while now, in case you didn’t know that.
If you live in China and are interested in this device, this might be your chance to get it on the cheap. Wait until it’s on sale and grab one, this is a really powerful handset and I have a feeling it will be out of stock rather soon.