[OFFTOPIC] China Phone Discussion - UPDATED 30/10/2013

[Guest Maringer]

to think the Tegra 4's 72 core GPU is not better than the Adrerno 320 is obviously a mistake, you mean the 330.

the snapdragon 800 and tegra 4 are very closely matched in terms of benchmarks,

but the tegra 4 will get a lot of of exclusive games / optimized for Tegra 4 to take advantage of the 72 core GPU,

this is what i'm looking forward to, loved the exclusive / optimized games from my old Tegra 2 device (tegra zone)

take note there are two versions of Tegra 4

Tegra 4i & Tegra 4, you can see the differences here

http://www.nvidia.co...-processor.html

Yep, you're quite right. Brainfart - I did intend to say Adreno 330, not 320.

Regardless, the "72 core" stuff from NVidia should be taken with a pinch of salt. It's a marketing term, little more. What counts is processing power and, from what we know, the Adreno 330 currently provides more than 30% more flops than the T4. Now, the T4 may end up having better efficiency from their architecture and drivers than the Adreno, but I'd tend to doubt it will be much faster. A lot depends on the clocks they can eke out of the device in mobile format.

The Tegra 4i looks a very useful chip with the integrated baseband and high-clocked A9s. Should be a very good chip for a mainstream-level phone when it is eventually released and it is a pity this isn't likely to be until some time in 2014. Not a bad reference design for this one, actually:

http://www.anandtech...-tegra-4i-phone

Edit: A couple of small changes.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Maringer

[Guest deuse]

loving the design of the Huawei Ascend P6...

I love huawei Emotion UI. In fact I was hoping they would bring it out as a launcher for anyone to use but no.

[Guest tillaz]

Yep, you're quite right. Brainfart - I did intend to say Adreno 330, not 320.

Regardless, the "72 core" stuff from NVidia should be taken with a pinch of salt. It's a marketing term, little more. What counts is processing power and, from what we know, the Adreno 330 currently provides more than 30% more flops than the T4. Now, the T4 may end up having better efficiency from their architecture and drivers than the Adreno, but I'd tend to doubt it will be much faster. A lot depends on the clocks they can eke out of the device in mobile format.

The Tegra 4i looks a very useful chip with the integrated baseband and high-clocked A9s. Should be a very good chip for a mainstream-level phone when it is eventually released and it is a pity this isn't likely to be until some time in 2014. Not a bad reference design for this one, actually:

http://www.anandtech...-tegra-4i-phone

Edit: A couple of small changes.

yeah, Tegra 4 beats the 800 on CPU scores, the 800 was clocked at 2.3GHz, vs Tegra 4 clocked at 1.9GHz

but the 800 wins on the GPU, i find this kind of odd coming from a mainstream GPU manufacture...

regarding the 72 cores, more cores is always going to be better, wouldn't say its just a marketing term :huh:

[Guest Rico_89]

loving the design of the Huawei Ascend P6...

Thinnest phone in the world .. saw it on Click on the BBC. Apparently you can operate the touch screen while wearing gloves :) .

my girlfriend keeps telling me she prefers a nice think one to a thin one which I thought was strange :D

Girls over "think" everything .. ;) Thin rules :P .

[Guest kieranswhite]

Thinnest phone in the world .. saw it on Click on the BBC. Apparently you can operate the touch screen while wearing gloves :) .

Girls over "think" everything .. ;) Thin rules :P .

there is a chinese company bringing out a 5mm phone soon :0

i saw it on Gizchina

[Guest Maringer]

yeah, Tegra 4 beats the 800 on CPU scores, the 800 was clocked at 2.3GHz, vs Tegra 4 clocked at 1.9GHz

but the 800 wins on the GPU, i find this kind of odd coming from a mainstream GPU manufacture...

regarding the 72 cores, more cores is always going to be better, wouldn't say its just a marketing term :huh:

Bear in mind that 'cores' doesn't really mean anything much in the graphics world, whether you are talking about the GPUs in mobile devices or in PCs. GPUs are made from various arrays of Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs) which are set up as texture units and pixel shader units. A chip with fewer but bigger and more complex 'cores' may outpace one with many more smaller cores as it may have fewer texture units or less pixel processing power (ALUs). Or, a 'core' in one chip may run at different clocks of the 'core' of another chip. Basically, GPU designs from different manufacturers tend to be so different from one another that comparing the number of 'cores' they have is meaningless. Memory speed is also an issue as well. Judging by the views of those in the know on Beyond3D, the Adreno 330 looks to have a lot more ALUs (probably 50%) than the 320 but the same number of texture units. With the right workload this leads to much improved performance.

Ultimately, bragging about the number of 'cores' in a chip is just a marketing thing as processing power linked to bandwidth and the design is the only thing that counts. If Tegra 4 had arrived in late 2012 or early 2013, it may have been the performance champ but it seems unlikely (IMHO) that it will outperform the Snapdragon 800 GPU. Possibly, it will beat it in CPU benchmarks but this depends a lot on whether or not it can compete on power draw. Qualcomm seem quite confident that the Krait 400 has the current A15s well beaten in the power draw stakes (the green line is the A15 Chromebook, I believe):

http://images.anandt...formance400.png

Perhaps NVidia can reduce power consumption compared to this but it does seem that the Cortex-A15 is a very power-hungry design. This is why ARM originally designed the big.LITTLE interaction so you could have the Cortex-A7s doing most of the work with low power draw and the much more powerful A15s kicking in when needed.

As for the fact that the Adreno will probably outperform NVidia's GPU, NVidia have been very conservative on the performance of the GPUs in Tegra chips. Also, bear in mind that "Adreno" is an anagram of "Radeon" as the GPU is based on ATI's mobile technology (ATI is now part of AMD) developed before it was sold off to Qualcomm. Both NVidia and Qualcomm have top-notch GPU engineers working for them.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Maringer

[Guest dakok]

New 4.5" phone arriving from Xiaocai!

After the 5" G6 model (dual booting Xiaomi M2s clone), xiaocai presents X9 phone

4.5"

2Gb Ram / 32Gb Rom

8/5 camera

7.9mm thick

2.8mm bevel

Price yet unknown, cinese say it won`t pass 1000 yuan too much :)

Looking for trusted brands and models?

Edited June 27, 2013 by dakok

[Guest tillaz]

A chip with fewer but bigger and more complex 'cores' may outpace one with many more smaller cores as it may have fewer texture units or less pixel processing power (ALUs). Or, a 'core' in one chip may run at different clocks of the 'core' of another chip. Basically, GPU designs from different manufacturers tend to be so different from one another that comparing the number of 'cores' they have is meaningless. Memory speed is also an issue as well. Judging by the views of those in the know on Beyond3D, the Adreno 330 looks to have a lot more ALUs (probably 50%) than the 320 but the same number of texture units. With the right workload this leads to much improved performance.

think you misunderstood what i said, i did not mean more cores is always going to be better than any other GPU / CPU with less. i was talking about Tegra 4 in general.

for instance it having 72 custom cores to split tasks across is always going to be better than it having 12.

i wonder if the snapdragon 800 will be like the 400 in my nexus 4...

it gets extremely hot when gaming or playing a video which results in the CPU been throttled down to 1.2GHZ

[Guest tillaz]

New 4.5" phone arriving from Xiaocai!

After the 5" G6 model (dual booting Xiaomi M2s clone), xiaocai presents X9 phone

4.5"

2Gb Ram / 32Gb Rom

8/5 camera

7.9mm thick

2.8mm bevel

Price yet unknown, cinese say it won`t pass 1000 yuan too much

Looking for trusted brands and models?

this look like an interesting phone, but i doubt it will cost the same as the G6, but if it does i would have one for sure.

[Guest Maringer]

New 4.5" phone arriving from Xiaocai!

After the 5" G6 model (dual booting Xiaomi M2s clone), xiaocai presents X9 phone

4.5"

2Gb Ram / 32Gb Rom

8/5 camera

7.9mm thick

2.8mm bevel

Price yet unknown, cinese say it won`t pass 1000 yuan too much :)

Now, that looks as though it could be just about my ideal phone. Providing it had a microSD card slot. I'm guessing I'll be out of luck in this respect, however. :(

[Guest dakok]

Isn`t microSD a standard in phones?

[Guest Maringer]

think you misunderstood what i said, i did not mean more cores is always going to be better than any other GPU / CPU with less. i was talking about Tegra 4 in general.

for instance it having 72 custom cores to split tasks across is always going to be better than it having 12.

i wonder if the snapdragon 800 will be like the 400 in my nexus 4...

it gets extremely hot when gaming or playing a video which results in the CPU been throttled down to 1.2GHZ

The 72 cores of the GPU wouldn't make a difference to graphics performance over a hypothetical chip with 12 cores which had the same texture and pixel shading power. The compexity of graphics programming these days means that all sorts of operations are rolled up into larger shaders which the GPU driver then decodes and sends to the various cores as required. This is why you often find driver updates make such a big improvement in performance as the driver uses the power of the GPU more efficiently.

Whatever happens, technology is developing apace and all of the new chips should provide really good performance. The only pity is that phone games tend to be developed towards the lowest common denominator of much older phones so it will probably be some time before any games are around which can take advantage of the power of the new devices!

I'd heard that the Snapdragon 400 throttled in some devices, but didn't realise the Nexus 4 had the same problem. That slide I linked to earlier would tend to indicate that Qualcomm think they've got the power draw situation sorted out for the 800. Let's hope so because you don't really want to see your bang-whizz new device throttling!

[Guest Maringer]

Isn`t microSD a standard in phones?

Unfortunately, lots of new phones don't seem to have a microSD (TransFlash) slot. My usage pattern means I need well over 32GB storage so, until we get cheap phones with 64GB internally, I'll need a device with a microSD slot.

[Guest Rico_89]

New 4.5" phone arriving from Xiaocai!

After the 5" G6 model (dual booting Xiaomi M2s clone), xiaocai presents X9 phone

4.5"

2Gb Ram / 32Gb Rom

8/5 camera

7.9mm thick

2.8mm bevel

Price yet unknown, cinese say it won`t pass 1000 yuan too much :)

Looking for trusted brands and models?

I've noticed that the smaller screens tend to sell for less in China so maybe you guys have a chance at that price being realistic. Is there a realistic release date? Seems like everyday there's another phone waiting to be released.

As for trusted brands and models .. well that's a big question that should bring a lot of factors into play. And not just build quality and popularity in China. You have to consider everything from the reliability of the seller to the country and network you'll be using it on. And then there's the price, why buy from China just for the sake of buying from China, if you're going to spend close to two hundred then throw another fifty at it and get a phone sold in the UK, because only when someone actually receives a particular phone in your particular country and tells you that the functions you require are working, only then can you be sure it's trusted.

[Guest dakok]

.... because only when someone actually receives a particular phone in your particular country and tells you that the functions you require are working, only then can you be sure it's trusted.

You can`t :D .

You can only be sure that that someone has a working phone (if he could be trusted). :P

God knows what you`re gonna get!

Edited June 27, 2013 by dakok

[Guest JetKun]

New 4.5" phone arriving from Xiaocai!

After the 5" G6 model (dual booting Xiaomi M2s clone), xiaocai presents X9 phone

4.5"

2Gb Ram / 32Gb Rom

8/5 camera

7.9mm thick

2.8mm bevel

Price yet unknown, cinese say it won`t pass 1000 yuan too much :)

Provided this costs the same as the Vowney or slightly more, and has a decent battery, I'll be snapping this up instead of the Jiayu

Edit: I can see it...next week, Jiayu prices drop and carry on dropping for a month as the chinese mobile market rampages forwards like a drug-addled war elephant

Edit: DAMN this fickle GBP>USD exchange rate...it's imposisble to find Jiayu G4 for under <£140 dammit

Edited June 27, 2013 by JetKun

[Guest dakok]

Finally I bought ZTE v987 on Hotmid :D .

Fingers crossed now.

In few hours from payment I got tracking number which is useless for first few days (and maybe more :)).

Just an info for those thinking of Tmallbox shopping - prices are the best, but there is no paypal option :(

I`ll keep you informed....

[Guest Rico_89]

Finally I bought ZTE v987 on Hotmid :D .

Fingers crossed now.

In few hours from payment I got tracking number which is useless for first few days (and maybe more :)).

Just an info for those thinking of Tmallbox shopping - prices are the best, but there is no paypal option :(

I`ll keep you informed....

Finally somebody bought something else lol ... I have a few questions if you don't mind.

£156.. Is that what you actually paid for it? I've noticed that with Paypal you get a different exchange rate so it seems to be a few pounds more than the listed price.

Is it easy to root/ CWM and do you know of any issues with 3G mobile data or GPS in European countries?

Also is that site trusted or are you rolling the dice a little ;) .

Lastly; Good luck, looks like a great phone for the price, 5" screens are awesome.

Note; GiffGaff have just lowered their international call prices and now you can call China/India for 2p a minute. If anyone needs to query an order or a particular phone, and they think they can talk to someone that speaks English, then it might come in handy.

[Guest smweb]

Finally I bought ZTE v987 on Hotmid :D .

Fingers crossed now.

In few hours from payment I got tracking number which is useless for first few days (and maybe more :)).

Just an info for those thinking of Tmallbox shopping - prices are the best, but there is no paypal option :(

I`ll keep you informed....

Good buy, post a mini review once you get it :D

[Guest deuse]

So far I'm happy with merimobiles. Paid on monday and it was shipped on thurs now it's in hong kong. next stop the UK :)

[Guest kieranswhite]

So far I'm happy with merimobiles. Paid on monday and it was shipped on thurs now it's in hong kong. next stop the UK :)

what tracking site are you using and what postage??

[Guest deuse]

what tracking site are you using and what postage??

DHL 3-6 day postage

[Guest dakok]

Finally somebody bought something else lol ... I have a few questions if you don't mind.

With so many of you buying Vowney - I just couldn`t do it :)

It had to be something else so I picked ZTE v987.

£156.. Is that what you actually paid for it? I've noticed that with Paypal you get a different exchange rate so it seems to be a few pounds more than the listed price.

Paid £12 more than £156:

"extra insurance" ~ £2

Shipping thru SingPost ~ £10

But got this as a gift:

Nillkin case (black)

Nillkin goes £6 in my benefit so I can survive that extra expences :)

Is it easy to root/ CWM and do you know of any issues with 3G mobile data or GPS in European countries?

Rooting - there will be no problem.

v987 has really many resources (check forums tab in my sig),

for example: dev Bruno on XDA who did a lot for this phone.

Do you know that EtoTalk flashes his v987 rom on new phones (without permission).

My country (european, matter of fact, on 1st July :)) has 3 operators with 2100MHz on 3g. One of them

uses 900MHz band too, in rural areas.

Specs for v987 say 3G: 900/2100MHz - so this should be fine.

Also is that site trusted or are you rolling the dice a little ;)

.

Regarding seller choice:

From what I`ve found reading like mad for last three weeks - Hotmid shopping gave the least bad user experiences. Even that bad ones were benign. No scams so far.

One thing that drew my attention was they don`t offer too many phones.

Only 7-8 top chinese brands. Alltogether maybe 30 different models.

That looks serious :)

Lastly; Good luck, looks like a great phone for the price, 5" screens are awesome.

Yeah, 5" size just bearable enough for a phone and just big enough for other smart functions. :D

Edited June 28, 2013 by dakok

[Guest Sere83]

I am just putting the finishing touches to my Voiwney V5 review. I will keep you guys posted....

Edited June 28, 2013 by Sere83

[Guest kieranswhite]

I am just putting the finishing touches to my Voiwney V5 review. I will keep you guys posted....

is it a video or text review??