Light Reading Mobile – Telecom News, Analysis, Events, and Research
LR Mobile News Analysis  
Ray Le Maistre

Android's Chinese Challengers

January 22, 2013 | Ray Le Maistre |
Major Android smartphone brands such as High Tech Computer Corp. (HTC) and Sony Corp. face a real threat from "high performance lower cost" devices produced by the likes of Lenovo Group Ltd. and Xiaomi, according to some user panel research findings from mobile service monitoring system specialist Ciqual Ltd.

The Service Provider Information Technology (SPIT) firm, which has developed a monitoring application that sits on mobile devices, has gathered quantitative and qualitative data from its China Users Panel and the results are revealing.

While Samsung Corp. scored well -- its products dominated the top of Ciqual's device usage rankings table and delivered the lowest latency and packet loss of the most popular devices -- other big names found their products overshadowed by up and coming vendors. Among Ciqual's findings are:

  • The Xiaomi MI 1S and Lenovo A750 smartphones "delivered better user performance and higher usage than ZTE, Huawei and HTC Android devices" and are "more popular than the Samsung Galaxy Note."

  • Bigger screens lead to greater data usage -- "Samsung Galaxy Note users download three times more data than users with a screen size less than 4 inches," notes Ciqual.

  • HTC, Huawei and ZTE devices "ranked lower in the device performance analysis than less well-known local Chinese brands, including Xiaomi, Gionee and Yulong."

    Now, this study was in China, which is an unusual market in just about every way you can imagine: Between them, Ciqual's user panel members use 249 different Android models from 35 vendors, many of them local players. That, though, provides an amazing market in which Chinese vendors can hone their skills and take their devices into international markets -- some of the less known names of today may be tomorrow's Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. or ZTE Corp.

    For more details of Ciqual's findings, see Upstarts Outperform Andoid's Big Brands: Study and this Ciqual blog.

    — Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading



    • Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

    Single tags

    These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

    <br> Defines a single line break

    <hr> Defines a horizontal line

    Matching tags

    These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

    <a> Defines an anchor

    <b> Defines bold text

    <big> Defines big text

    <blockquote> Defines a long quotation

    <caption> Defines a table caption

    <cite> Defines a citation

    <code> Defines computer code text

    <em> Defines emphasized text

    <fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

    <h1> This is heading 1

    <h2> This is heading 2

    <h3> This is heading 3

    <h4> This is heading 4

    <h5> This is heading 5

    <h6> This is heading 6

    <i> Defines italic text

    <p> Defines a paragraph

    <pre> Defines preformatted text

    <q> Defines a short quotation

    <samp> Defines sample computer code text

    <small> Defines small text

    <span> Defines a section in a document

    <s> Defines strikethrough text

    <strike> Defines strikethrough text

    <strong> Defines strong text

    <sub> Defines subscripted text

    <sup> Defines superscripted text

    <u> Defines underlined text

    Network Computing encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Network Computing moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Network Computing further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

     
    Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
     

    Going Soft at MWC

    SPONSORED BY
    More LR Mobile News Analysis
    MW13: Five Key Trends for CSPs
    Five communications service provider (CSP) takeaways from four days at the Management World SPIT-fest
    Euronews: Telefónica Teams With Samsung
    As bandy-legged soccer legend Becks prepares to hang up his boots for the final time, Euronews dons its dress-down-Friday sarong and brings you what really matters: the latest EMEA telecom headlines
    Investors Go Giddy Over Cisco's Q3
    Yes, it's that exciting that Cisco's news wasn't so bad
    Euronews: EU Threatens China Probe
    Also in today's EMEA roundup: Saudi operator denies surveillance claims; Vodafone does VDSL with Deutsche Telekom; AT&T can't see much M&A potential in Europe
    MW13: Tu Go Users Get Chatty
    Users of Telefónica Digital's voice-over-IP service are spending 15 to 20 percent of their talk time within the app
    Related Content
    Most Popular
    Read
    White Papers SPONSORED CONTENT
    Featured
    Resource Library SPONSORED CONTENT
    Docsis Provisioning of EPON (DPoE)
    CableLabs spec that blends Docsis-style provisioning with EPON