The Truth behind Android Benchmarks' Scores

The Beginning : How it all started

Even yesterday, an allegedly Snapdragon S800 Mi3 leaked out on Antutu and there was a lot of talking surrounding the low score and a few theories quickly attached to it.
Cheating in benchmarking has always been the most popular sport in the PC world. We were just hoping it wouldn't becoming one so fast so soon in Android. The first one caught was the Samsung Galaxy 4 in late June via a post at Beyond3D from @AndreF.
Lately, Samsung, has been caught doing it again with the Note 3. This time, it was Arstechnicawhich spotted it.
Samsung took most of the heat, but what about others manufacturers ?

Apple iPhone 5S Slow Motion doesn't capture 720p Video

After all the hype around the so called Slow Motion video mode, it is time to see what it is worth.

The iPhone 5S does deliver slow motion 720p video at but the trick resides in its recording which is not set at 720p despite the new A7 chip.
Here is how it is done.

In Depth Size Comparison : OPPO N1 vs Samsung Galaxy Note 3

A lot of concerns have raised after OPPO N1's official presentation because it is indeed very big. It is not only that the smartphone packs a 5.9 inch FHD display which is a bit bigger than Samsung Galaxy Note 3's one but the overall bezel got supersized due to the rotative camera.

Umi officially presents the Octo Core Umi X2S

During a Hong Kong event, the new Umi X2S has been presented and was right there on the Umi booth. The X2S takes after the X2's design with some small changes like the redesign of the home button but it comes in 8 cores flavor.

Lenovo K910 Snapdragon S800 got Official Network License Approval

After publishing the best growth rate in the computer department maintaining its top position, the Chinese firm is decided to go toe to toe against the top end tier of the smartphones industry.

The next flagship, the K910 is taking after its predecessor's design, the K900 but this time, Lenovo is losing its Intel SoC and is going towards Qualcomm and the very popular Snapdragon S800.
Well, it seems the launch date is coming rather sooner than later since the K910 got the the license approval from Chinese officials, the equivalent of the US FCC.

The Smartphone has already been largely leaked out and score around 35 000 on Antutu which is on par with the rest of the pack.
It comes with a 5.5 inch FHD display, 2 GB RAM, 16 GB of storage expandable via a Micro SD card and a 13 MP rear camera.

How long employees stay in tech companies ?

Sometimes, well, most of the times, things are not like they appear. While Google has been praised for being the best place to work several times, it fails to retain employees as long as its competitors except for Amazon.
At Amazon, manager are often asked to cut loose the least efficient performers of their team, it might be the same at Google. While top job (like Marissa Meyer's) wouldn't be as much concerned as low profile jobs, it sill is a upsetting news especially after viewing the movie "The Internship".

Anyway, enjoy your Sunday people.

Source : Business Week

The Rise of Asian Internet Users from 2008 to Today

Internet penetration is as good as an indicator as any other to measure the economic rise of a geographic area.
So I gather a few maps the Oxfort Internet Institute tracing the evolution of the Internet Population since 2008.

It is interesting to see that China was already the largest country users wise back then. Or course the Internet Penetration wasn't as good as Europe or North America.
The populations in India and China are so big that it was already quite something.

A few years later, in 2011, it has become bigger. Much bigger.

Mark Graham and Stefano De Sabbata, authors of the maps stated :

"First, the rise of Asia as the main contributor to the world’s Internet population; 42 percent of the world’s Internet users live in Asia, and China, India, and Japan alone host more Internet users than Europe and North America combined."

Last week, the two researchers published on the same 2011 map the top website for each country. The usual suspects are there : Google, Facebook and Baidu for China and South Korea. But there is one surprise : Yahoo topped Google in Japan.

XiaoMi is sued in China by Youku Tudou

The XiaoMi Box allows user to stream various Chinese programs and others international movies/series on your TV. Well it seems not everything was allowed to be broadcast.

Youku Tudou, the Chinese Youtube (which is censored in China), just sued Xiaomi for broadcasting licensed content.
According to Sina Tech, Youku is claiming that Xiaomi is infringing 10 copyrighted TV shows ans ask for an immediate removal of the programs. On top of that, Youku is also asking for a public apology and a fee of RMB 5.1 million (~ $ 833 333).

OPPO N1 Benchmark results are out

AS you already know, the OPPO N1 is running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon S600 chip clocked at 1.7 GHz alongside the Adredo 320 GPU with a FHD 5.9" display and 2 GB RAM. 

Now that the main specs are out, let's check out the results. 

Personally, I expected a score a bit below around 20 000 - 22 000 because the XiaoMi Mi 2S has a similar score around 25 000 but it sports a 720p HD screen and the Samsung Galaxy S4 got a beefy overclocked version of the S600. 

It is an honorable score and the result shows that OPPO did a great job optimizing their device. While performing correctly, it is still quite below the S800 scores (30 000 - 35 000). 

China shipped 360 million Smartphones in 2013. 450 million next year

According to IDC, China will most likely increase its Smartphones sales up to 450 million in 2014 staying on top of the rest of the world.
More than one third of the population will get access to smartphones which is huge in such a populated country. Chinese market has grown so much the last few years that it has become a force to be reckoned with among top technology countries.

While nothing has been confirmed as to when 4G roll-out is about to begin, IDC is projecting that one fourth of smartphones shipments in 2014 will be equipped with 4G capability.

The Chinese market is dominated by Samsung with almost 20% of market share, local companies Lenovo and Huawei are trailing far behind, none has reached 10% market share.

But for the first time, Apple is becoming a real threat after signing a deal with China Mobile, the world largest provider.

Source : Reuters

XiaoMi : 10 million units sold for the Mi 2 Series

XiaoMi has reached the 10 million units milestone with its Mi 2 series (Mi 2, Mi 2S and Mi 2A) in 11 months. Last year, they sold "only" 7.19 million smartphones in total.

The Chinese company should exceed its 20 million prediction. There have been more than 7.5 million HongMi pre-orders and the Mi 3 is launching this fall before the end of the year.

Everything looking good for Lei Jun, CEO of XiaoMi.

Source : Lei Jun's weibo account

Jimmy Kimmel did it again : people are testing out the new iPhone 5S (iPad Mini) !

Last year, Jimmy Kimmel was handing the iPhone 4S to random people in Hollywood Boulevard to get their take on the... new iPhone 5.

This year, the show took it to the next level, they repeated the experience but instead of handing people the iPhone 5, they gave them the iPad Mini and the result is quite something.

Suffice is to say that the iPad mini is much bigger, much heavier and has less PPI than any iPhone out there.

Here is the incredible video :

"XiaoMi is now $10 billions worth" said CEO Lei Jun

After a new successful funding round, the XiaoMi CEO, Lei Jun confirms through his Sina Weibo account a valuation of XiaoMi of $10 billions. A year ago, his company was "only" worth $4 billions.

As we mentioned in many of our reports, the growth rate is accelerating and it won't slow down with the XiaoMi Mi 3, a Zi Mi (Purple Rice) Tablet or/and Smart TVs.

Lei Jun was a lot compared to Steve Jobs but the man recused that statement a few weeks ago. The CEO says that his company is a lot like Amazon and it is e-commerce first and not a phone maker. Seeing how the Mi Store is growing, Lei Jun might be right since its online store is offering more and more products and most of them are not XiaoMi made.

The World might finally see the first Tegra 4 powered device : ZTE U988S

We were growing more and more desperate to see a Tegra 4 powered phone in 2013.

The main issue of the Tegra 4 SoC is its power consumption. While it is arguably the best chip out there raw performance wise, four Cortex A15 consumes just too much energy.
That is why we saw all year long smartphones equipped with Snadragon, Mediatek and some Samsung chips.
Qualcomm chose to modify the raw Cortex A15 a lot to meet energy consumption requirements, losing some power in the process.
MediaTek is using the low power Cortex A7 which is almost on par with the Cortex A9.
Samsung decided to put Cortex A7 alongside the A15, using the big.Little design, but somewhat failed to distribute the new Exynos line worldwide (production issues).

But finally, aside from the Nvidia Shield Project (don't even get me started on this), there was no Tegra 4 device nor smartphone.
Somewhat, ZTE is risking itself to launch the U988S, the very first smartphone with the Nvidia chip : the Tegra 4 is clocked at 1.8 GHz powering a 5 inch 1090 FHD display, 2 GB Ram and a 13 MP rear camera.

We are very excited to see how it will perform and if it can address the battery life issue. We will offer the ZTE U988S around the same price tag as the XiaoMi Mi 2S (~ USD 380)

Stay tuned on PhonAsia for more informations.

China has 591 millions Internet users, here are the details

We talked in our previous post about the rise of Chinese companies, but this growth is not the unique privilege of professionals, the people of China consumer more online content than ever.

Here are some facts about Chinese internet users : 50% are less than 30 years old, they spend a average time of 20.5 hours (from 18 the previous year), the value of online sales match the US market.

Everything is detailed in the following Infographic made by Go-Globe.com.


Infographic by- GO-Globe.com

XiaoMi 3rd Anniversary !

Happy Birthday XiaoMi !

We are actually a bit late since the company saw birth in 2010, on April but XiaoMi decided to celebrate their anniversary on August, 16th.

It is a real success story since the launch of the company, 7.2 millions units sold in 2012, 20 millions expected this year. Talk about growth, right ?

Here are some numbers to back up its success :
- 20 000 apps on Mi Store (their own app store) with 3.5 downloads daily and more than 500 millions downloads overall
- 3.5 millions themes downloads daily on their theme app
- 7.45 millions HongMi pre-order
- more than 7 millions Mi 2 / Mi 2S sold during the first semester

Xiaomi is celebrating their birthday throughout activities and events on their own store (reserved to China though).

PhonAsia is glad to be a small part of this success.

XiaoMi beats Samsung and takes the crown for the best flagship

In the latest reports charts spotted by TechCrunch, XiaoMi sold more Mi 2 and Mi 2S during the first semester than Samsung and its Galaxy S4.
The Chinese company reached the staggering number of 7.19 millions units topping every others smartphone out there. People were not wrong on betting on the Chinese brand since it offers the same power as the Samsung Galaxy S4 but at half the price.

XiaoMi will not stop there and is preparing to launch its alleged Purple Rice (Zi Mi) Tablet on August, 16th followed by the XiaoMi Mi 3 this fall.

XiaoMi launched the MIUI ROM Porting contest

MIUI has lanched a huge constest since August, 1st. Constestants have to port MIUI V5 on MediaTek chip based devices and can begin to submit their work from September 16 to September 30.
After the submission phase, the selected roms will be distributed during the following month. During October, people and MIUI will rank roms and on November, 1st, winners will be proclaimed.

Here are how prizes will given to :

1. ROM Grand Prize (20 Winners): RMB 10,000 + Trophy + Certificate + Gift Pack

2. Merit Award (30 Winners): Mi2 S + Certificate +Gift Pack
    *Gift Pack includes: Xiaomi Earbud + MIUI Doll + MIUI Hoodie

3. Once a contestant’s work is accepted and released, he/she will become a member of the MIUI Porting Team and enjoy

    related rights. Rights of MIUI Porting Team

So, are you ready ?

XiaoMi sold its first 100 000 HongMi Red Rice phones batch in 90 seconds and even more

We told your earlier this month that XiaoMi partened up with China Mobile and QQ to make a special event offering the very first HongMi in China Soil on August, 12th.

Well, everything is already sold out in 90 seconds, I didn't have the time to breath, it was so fast.
But even more impressive, the pre-orders just reached 7.45 millions for the budget phone HongMi which forced XiaoMi to revisit its annual previsions, the Chinese Smartphone firm wants to sell 20 millions devices from the old expectations of 15 millions.

PhonAsia is glad to be part of such a ambitious project and still offer the HongMi for pre-orders in our shop.
Be careful about the 3G network which works only in China using the TD-SCDMA technology only available in China.

We tested Android Device Manager by Google

Basically, Android Device Manager allows you to locate, ring the phone and erase all your data (if you previously allowed it).

The new Google Service launched yesterday and it is working very well. Our first try was not that successulf as it failed to rang our Nexus 7 tablet but it worked flawlessly with our XiaoMi Mi 2S phone.
A few hours later, everything is working like a charm.
Our first critic concerns the localization feature. It works now accurately on our Nexus 7 without enabling the GPS but only approximatively on our Mi 2S without enabling the GPS first. Somehow, Google finds a way to use the GPS chip on the Nexus 7 (and maybe others Nexus devices) but uses only 2G/3G network (and maybe Wi-Fi) to locate your non Nexus device.

To activate the erasing function, you need to allow it. Just ask Google (on the device manager page) to send your the notification to guide to the right option to enable.
If you choose to erase your device (in case, you lost it), it'll take just a few minutes.

The service is linked to your gmail account (you need to log in first) and detect all the devices linked to it. It is much needed feature since all the major manufacturers are already offering it (XiaoMi, Apple, HTC, Samsung at least).