Chinese Android Phones 2 - Read First Post!

Reusing Thargors OP because it's good

1. Picking a quality brand
Gizchina.com regularly review and announce new devices, and should be your first port of call for looking at devices
DO NOT BUY CLONES
They generally suck, and have a good chance of being destroyed by customs
Here are some quality brands to get you started:

Android phones

Xiaomi
Gionee
INUI
Oppo
Vivo
Meizu
HUAWEI
Lenovo
CUBOT
Xiaocai
Zopo
THL
UMI
JIAYU
ZTE
iOcean
Cube
Elephone
Ulephone
UNI

Tablets
Lenovo
PIPO
JXD
Onda
CUBE
Ainol
Ployer
Freelander
CHUWI
AMPE
Ramos

All that being said, new brands are constantly popping up and not all of them will be bad so don’t write them off until you’ve checked out some reviews from their products!

2. What to Look For:

Next up you’ll be wanting to pick a device, whether that be phone or tablet there are a few thing’s to look out for to ensure you end up with a product that’s really going to meet your expectations.

First up, finding a phone! Our favourite website for finding Chinese androids is www.kimovil.com , its a great website where you can choose a phone from a wide selection based on the specifications that are important to you, you'll get a link to some sellers and a score of out of 10 for numerous aspects to the phone.

There aren't enough regulars here to spoonfeed recommendations to everyone who comes asking "I have €100 what do I buy?", so if you find a phone you like on kimovil and ask us about it, you're much more likely to get an answer, and faster too.

Build quality

This is difficult to decipher without having the device in hand but choosing the right brand is a good start, from there on you’ll want to check reviews and in particular, check out hands-on videos on Youtube which should give a better idea of the overall quality of the device. Mostly chinese devices these days are supringly well built, especially those from the bigger brands so this shouldn’t be too big an issue.

Fake features:

Unfortunately some products, particularly clone products will be advertised with features that they don’t have or are otherwise mis-advertised. Look at for features which seem too good to be true and be sure to check the specification across many different websites. If in doubt then contact the seller.

Poor quality cameras:

If there’s one spec where numbers don’t tell the whole story it’s the camera specs. Often you’ll see phones and tablets advertised with decent sounding camera’s, sometimes with unrealistically high mega pixel counts – if this looks to be the case then walk away, mostly likely the device in question will use some poor quality software trickery to interpolate a lower quality image to a higher resolution giving nothing like the quality stated. In this area there really is no substitute for impartial, third party hands-on write-ups and camera samples so you can see for yourself the actual quality on offer.

Under performing chipset’s

One of the first thing’s you’ll notice when comparing china phones is that they are most often powered by Mediatek in phones and Allwinner or Rockchip for tablets, rather than the usual Qualcomm or Exynos chipsets often found in western phones. This is primarily due to cost as these other chipsets are cheaper and don’t quite offer the same levels of performance you get from a top of the range Qualcomm or Exynos processor, in most cases though they are more than enough for 90% of people.

The best chipset’s to look out for other than the establish Qualcomm and Exynos ones are currently:

Phones
Snapdragon 410
Snapdragon 800
Snapdragon 801
Snapdragon 805
Mediatek MTK6752
Mediatek MTK6732
Mediatek MTK6595
Mediatek MTK6735
Mediatek MTK6753
Mediatek MTK6795

Tablets
Rockchip Rk3188
Rockchip Rk3066
Allwinner A31

If in doubt, check out some benchmark scores to get an idea of performance, bearing in mind that multi-core processors may appear more potent than their true, real world performance – this is especially true of new octa-core proccesors so bear this in mind.

Also be aware that each chipest has its limits so for example the Rockchip Rk3066 is a great chipest for up to 720p resolution but any more than that and you’ll see it struggle, so for want of a better phrase – “courses for courses”.

3. Where to Buy From

Broadly there are two types of place you can purchase your device, marketplace type websites or traditional online retailers.

Marketplace sites

These are websites that essentially act as a platform allowing you direct access to wholesalers and maybe even direct to manufacturers in some cases.

The two best known of these types of websites are:

http://uk.alibaba.com/
http://www.aliexpress.com/


Traditional Retailers

Banggood - http://www.banggood.com/

Pandawill – http://www.pandawill.com/

Dealextreme – http://www.dx.com/

BuySKU – http://www.buysku.com/

Merimobiles - http://www.merimobiles.com/

Honorbuy - http://www.honorbuy.com/

Coolicool - http://www.coolicool.com/

Chinavaison - http://www.chinavasion.com/

Etotalk - http://www.etotalk.com/

Mixeshop - http://www.mixeshop.com

Antelife - http://antelife.com

Minideal - http://minideal.com

IBuyGou - http://ibuygou.com


A number of these sellers have EU warehouses, allowing you to get your items delivered faster, and without any extra customs charges
Sellers with EU warehouses:
DX
Merimobiles
Honorbuy
Coolicool
Antelife
AliExpress Seller
Another Thanks to Spix for his recommendations here.

4. Making Payment

Use PayPal or Escrow


5. Avoiding Import Duty

Changing this as dodging customs is bad, m'kay? You can ask for the price to be marked down.

The formula is (phone price in € times 1.23) and then +€6 through An Post or +€15 through a courier

Final: If your phone is rooted, delete the bloatware, if not, apps such as Framaroot can be used to easily root most devices. A lot of MTK tutorials are universal, so if you've an MTK phone you'd like to root, any tutorial for that chip should work