How Indian Android Device Manufacturers are Fooling and Misleading You

krishnandu.sarkar

Simply a DIGITian
Staff member
Micromax Canvas 4, a mid-range smartphone is seeing hype and excitement comparable to the likes of multinational brands — perhaps for the first time for an Indian manufacturer. Promising specifications better than many high-end devices, it has led people into thinking that this company is offering much more value at much lesser price.

Which is wrong.

For a nation that has always been highly price-conscious, it’s very easy to mislead people by advertising the number of cores a phone or a tablet has.
Same goes for Lava, Karbonn, Intex, Spice and all other Indian manufacturers, which are having a dream run this year. From a meager handset market share of less than 3% in 2012, they now account for nearly 30% of it (source). This obviously could not have been possible without Android, which has been lately driving an explosion of budget smartphones and tablets.

Being an Android enthusiast for long, here are a few important tips from my side that you should keep in mind while you are looking for Android devices.

Unaware of how microprocessors work, the biggest misconception among the non tech-savvy crowd is that a device’s performance is measured by its number of CPU cores and the speed at which they’re clocked.
Thankfully, CPUs don’t work this way. A detailed explanation of their working is taught in colleges (I personally hate the subject which deals with this), but for the laymen — what actually matters is the architecture of the processor.
Think of CPU as a group of engineers working on some project. Each worker is a separate core. The amount of work done by the group does not depend on the quantity of the engineers, but on their skills as well as their speeds. A group of two highly skilled engineers can finish their assigned project faster than a group of four less skilled engineers working on the same project.

In a similar fashion, it’s totally possible for a dual-core or single-core CPU X to outperform a quad-core CPU Y. The single-core Lava X1000 might be the best example for this, which performs 10% better on the quadrant benchmark test.
Taking advantage of this unintelligence, manufacturers lure customers by releasing multi-core phones of mediocre architecture at 1/4th the price of high-end phones having the same number of cores. This leads people into believing that they’re providing the same level of performance at comparatively dirt-cheap rates.

How Indian Android Device Manufacturers are Fooling and Misleading You
 

Gauravs90

geek........
These companies are still growing because you don't have any choice in sub 15k android phones from reputed manufacturer. And all these local companies exist there only.
 

Gollum

Collector
you need to look at the chipset and apps
>all intel chipsets will not support all games but you can easily go for cortex a9 and so on
>the reason samsung and other brands are expensive is because they use the latest chipsets and spend a lot of money on testing.
Indian brands get their phone chipsets made by another company/s like mediatek and get the phones manufactured and designed by 3rd party companys. later get all of them assembled in china and release them in India. Its a cheap deal.
 

Nerevarine

Incarnate
you need to look at the chipset and apps
>all intel chipsets will not support all games but you can easily go for cortex a9 and so on
>the reason samsung and other brands are expensive is because they use the latest chipsets and spend a lot of money on testing.
Indian brands get their phone chipsets made by another company/s like mediatek and get the phones manufactured and designed by 3rd party companys. later get all of them assembled in china and release them in India. Its a cheap deal.

If by Samsung, you mean cortex a5 based proccys, then you are gravely mistaken.. (in 15k price segment)
Id say sony is a much better example
 

vijju6091

Feeling Gravity
you need to look at the chipset and apps
>all intel chipsets will not support all games but you can easily go for cortex a9 and so on
>the reason samsung and other brands are expensive is because they use the latest chipsets and spend a lot of money on testing.
Indian brands get their phone chipsets made by another company/s like mediatek and get the phones manufactured and designed by 3rd party companys. later get all of them assembled in china and release them in India. Its a cheap deal.

Totally Agreed on that
 

Zangetsu

I am the master of my Fate.
now all cheap android phones should pre-install Antutu/Quandrant benchmark app & display its score in showrooms to customers to get real-world performance & to prevent fooling with cores :-D
 

Empirial

Youngling
Now these local brands will soon issue statements to save their a$$e$ like "We're innocent, iss mein Padosi Mulk ka Chopsticks hai" :p
 

Flash

Lost in speed
For a layman, "the more the merrier". So, unless they're informed about the specifications & functionalities (as like the shared URL in the first post), they will still think Quad-core's (irrespective of the brand) are the best.

It maybe a offtopic, but still some people compare 1GB Android mobile to a 512MB WP, and say WP will lag because of low RAM..
 

Jripper

Pro/An---tagonist xD
Reputed brands should really step up their game in the mid-range. There used to be so many good phones in the 10-20k range. Nowadays there are hardly one or two good ones. That too if we are lucky.
 
I think indian brands got lucky they found Android.
Remember their earlier phones had JAVA based os.

The mobile phone business is now like assemble PCs ones. Get the hardware, port Android (which is pretty easy now a days) flash it and there u go... you got full feature pack phone. Android take cares of everything u need.

While u will notice diff in local branded phones and reputed brand phone when u check camera quality of both phones (just one ex.) reputed bands have done more software work than local ones.
Also local brands use low quality h/w (can't say 100% right). i have seen many local brand phones getting dead in a year.
(I also read that local/Chinese brand phone use LCD panels which are rejected by other reputed brand during manufacturing due to quality. I can't confirm on this. read on forum )
 
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Nerevarine

Incarnate
The funny thing is, Digit Mag themselves seem to promote this ..
See this article Lemon Aspire A4 - Build & Design Mobiles & PDAs Online Videos
a 5 star rating.. come on -_-
 

Hrishi

******************
Very well said.
Unfortunately it's not good to argue on this topic with Idiots.They'll not listen to us and will not understand why these crap phones s**k big time..
How Indian Android Device Manufacturers are Fooling and Misleading You

For a layman, "the more the merrier". So, unless they're informed about the specifications & functionalities (as like the shared URL in the first post), they will still think Quad-core's (irrespective of the brand) are the best.

It maybe a offtopic, but still some people compare 1GB Android mobile to a 512MB WP, and say WP will lag because of low RAM..

Dumb will always stay Dumb , no matter how much you brief the'm with specs and all tech. things.
 

Hrishi

******************
I really want to say thanks to the Author , for posting something like this finally. Man , I am fed up with non-techie people hanging around me with those pieces of chinese crap telling me how poor my Atrix 4G is.... :gawd:
 
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