Battle of the cheap Chinese Androids

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toyonut

1508 posts

Uber Geek

#172051 10-May-2015 11:45

Anyone had any experience with Chinese androids? Are they actually any good?
I'm not talking about just the OnePlus and Oppo phones either, but the smaller brands that seem good, but nobody has heard of really.

One that has caught my eye is Elephone.
The P6000 looks great. Also reviews well. No idea about the LTE bands and if they will work here though.
There is also the Xiaomi Redmi which looks great.

Anyone bought these kind of phones? Where is good to get them from? any others worth looking at?

Try Vultr using this link and get us both some credit:

http://www.vultr.com/?ref=7033587-3B

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NikT

1710 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1302751 12-May-2015 13:32

heylinb4nz:

Good to hear, missus just picked up a Zenfone 2 (ZE551ML) yesterday.

Annoyingly, ASUS has two different versions of Zenfone 2 with that same model number (I believe it's the higher & lower processor clock variant of the 4GB RAM version) as well as five different models per variant with different 4G bands. See: http://www.asus.com/Phones/ZenFone_2_ZE551ML/specifications/

The one you want is the 'Taiwan' version as opposed to the 'Worldwide' version (Taiwan uses Band 28, incidentally that's why HTC has good support for this band):

FDD-LTE: (TW version)
2100MHz(1)/1900MHz(2)/1800MHz(3)/1700MHz AWS(4)/850MHz(5)/900MHz(8)/700MHz(28)

For contrast, the more common 'WW' version:

FDD-LTE: (WW version)
2100MHz(1)/1900MHz(2)/1800MHz(3)/1700MHz AWS(4)/850MHz(5)/2600MHz(7)/900MHz(8)/800MHz(20)

So you do have to forgo Band 7/2600MHz in order to get Band 28/700MHz in the Zenfone 2, but as Band 7 is used for urban infill, it's less important right now. Will become more important over the next few years as 4G rollouts progress & more devices with carrier aggregation for Cat 6 LTE & above hit the market - we're talking 300Mbps.

Product Manager @ PB Tech

Smartphones @ PB Tech | Headphones @ PB Tech

rmt38

320 posts

Ultimate Geek
Inactive user

#1431687 20-Nov-2015 13:30

jonathan18:
old3eyes: Edit 3. If you're talking about a European ROM then you won't see the 850meg 3G band. They only seem to do 2100 and 900 though my Mi4i it has all NZ 3G bands and band 3 LTE..

rmt38:

I bought cheap model with chinese bands.
It has xiaomi.eu rom installed by the store I bought it from.
Here are enabled bands as shown by mediatek app.

God, there's so much to clarify before pressing 'buy'!

I'm assuming, by the suffix, that the xiaomi.eu ROMs are European, but going by rmt38's experience the cheap model (I assume TDD?) came with a xiaomi.eu ROM that supports 3G 850 (his post pasted below).

Could I expect something similar from the ROMS available at http://miuiandroid.com/?

rmt38 - which retailer did you purchase from? Edit: I searched the thread and it looks like you bought it from Goldway.

rmt38: I installed MTK Engineering Mode on the Redmi Note 2 cheaper chinese version, and it lists as enabled the following bands:
GSM: EGSM900, DCS1800, PCS1900, GSM850
UMTS: WCDMA-IMT-2000, WCDMA-PCS-1900, WCDMA-CLR-850, WCDMA-GSM-900
LTE: 1,3,7,38,39,40,41

The answers to your questions are:

You could expect it, but no guarantees. Best to go with what is known to work.

Aliexpress, hongkong goldway.