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
