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Oppo R1 smartphone arrives in China with a bright camera and high style
It's tough to stand out in the mid-range Android crowd, but Oppo may have found a way to separate itself from the pack. Its newly launched R1 smartphone carries a gold-effect metal frame that adds a touch of class around the 5-inch screen. Camera quality may also lure in a few buyers. The R1 carries a bright 8-megapixel, f/2.0 aperture shooter like that in the R819, and there's an upgraded 5-megapixel camera at the front. No one will mistake Oppo's latest hardware for a flagship, though. There's a modest 1.3GHz, quad-core MediaTek chip inside, and neither the 720p display resolution nor the 16GB of non-expandable storage will please video lovers. The real obstacle for some may be the price -- the R1 sells for ¥2,498 ($411) in its native China, which is a lot to pay when the Vivo X3 offers slightly better performance in a slimmer design.
Huawei's Honor brand challenges Xiaomi with 3X and 3C low-cost phones
Huawei's known for its Ascend smartphones around the world, but back in late 2011, the company also started toying with a small Honor series for select budget markets. Fast forward to today, the latter sub-brand has become Huawei's platform to compete with the sudden surge of affordable online brands in China -- most notably Xiaomi, the pioneer of that industry. With a little help from MediaTek (and ironically not Huawei's own HiSilicon), the phone maker is upping its firepower over this territory with two new dual-SIM devices: Honor 3X and Honor 3C. The Honor 3X joins the first wave of octa-core 1.7GHz MT6592-powered devices, and it boasts 2GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel f/2.2 main camera, a 5-megapixel 1.4-micron front imager plus a generous 3,000mAh battery. The 720p resolution on the glove-friendly, 5.5-inch IPS touchscreen may seem like a let-down, but in this case, Huawei reasoned that going 1080p would push power consumption up by as much as 20 percent, plus many folks may not notice the visual difference -- a point that Huawei Device Chairman Richard Yu has often echoed publicly.
MediaTek to launch true 8-core, 2GHz MT6592 chipset in November?
Samsung may already have its 8-core Exynos 5 Octa offering, but the original "big.LITTLE" implementation means only up to four cores work together at any time -- either the Cortex-A15 quartet or its lesser Cortex-A7 counterpart. In other words, we'd rather rename the chipset range to something like "Exynos 5 Quad Dual." But according to recent intel coming from Taipei and Shenzhen, it looks like Taiwan's MediaTek is well on its way to ship a true 8-core mobile chipset in Q4 this year.
