A Chinese Takeover

A lot of press inches have been given over recently to Apple and Samsung – the two giants of the smartphone world. But as greater expectations are placed on a brand, there are always two possible outcomes: greater prices, and/or disappointment. As such, the attention of many tech blogs has turned to the smartphones coming out of China. Often dismissed as poor copies of their Western rivals, we’ll show you that there are plenty of Chinese smartphones more than ready to hold their own in a global market.

Lenovo

Founded in 1984, it’s very likely that you’ll have heard of Lenovo, especially since their hiring of actor Ashton Kutcher as product engineer and spokesperson. However, the company are still more well-known for their computers and tablets than their smartphones.

One to watch: Look out for the Lenovo Vibe Z2 Pro. This 7.7mm metal smartphone has clean, edgy lines, and packs a 4,000mAh battery.

Huawei

Given their status as the largest telecom equipment manufacturer in the world, Huawei is a familiar name. We wrote last week about Huawei’s wearables from MWC15 – with their Android Wear watch more than holding its own against competitors from Apple and LG.

Ones to watch: The Huawei Ascend Mate 2, with a 6.1” display, offers excellent value for money, whilst the Ascend Mate 7, with a 6” display, has an attractive 7.9mm metal body, industry-leading fingerprint sensor, and a 4,100mAh battery. The Huawei Honor 6 Plus houses an innovative dual camera sensor, with two 8MP sensors allowing for better photography in low-light conditions.

Xiaomi

Pronounced shao-me, the company was founded in 2010, and is proving itself to be something of a game-changer. Makers of the bestselling affordable smartphone in Asia, the Redmi, Xiaomi are sometimes referred to as the “Chinese Apple” due to both the perceived design similarities, and the legions of dedicated fans.

Ones to watch: The Xiaomi Redmi Note, an almost unbeatable combination of quality and affordability in phablet form.

The Redmi 2 – a 4.7” screen, with 720 x 1280 display, running on a Snapdragon 410 64-bit quad core chip. If you can get hold of one, an excellent introduction to Xiaomi’s products.

The Xiaomi Mi Note. Described by many as the best Chinese smartphone, although not easily available outside of Asia. The Mi Note runs on a 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 chip – not quite as powerful as the OnePlus One’s Snapdragon 8.1, but none too shabby – and has a 5.7”, 1,920 x 1,080 display. This is a larger screen than the iPhone 6Plus, but both thinner and lighter.

The Mi Note combines enough innovative new features, with familiar, comfortable ones, to make it incredibly usable. Despite the OS no longer requiring capacitive buttons, the Mi Note features three on the bottom bezel – I for one prefer this set-up. The structure of the phone is a metal ‘body’ fixed between front and back Gorilla Glass 3, with a slight curve making it more comfortable to hold.

Perhaps the most interesting feature is the custom MIUI Android skin, described as “strikingly refreshing” in comparison to Samsung’s TouchWiz.

If you’re looking for the best mobile phones for you and your employees, as well as the best support for your business, look no further than Fivebars Mobile.

Mobile World Congress 2015: The Highlights

Last week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona saw over 93,000 visitors, from 200 countries. So much went on that it would be impossible to cover everything in one blog post, but we’ve trawled through all the product launches, all the speeches, and all the awards, to bring you the best of the best of MWC15.

Wearables

With rumours of Apple’s now-launched ‘iWatch’ doing the rounds in the run up to MWC, both Huawei, and LG debuted their upcoming wearable devices.

www.smarterwaching.com

Huawei offered their latest Android Wear watch, with circular display, text, email, and phone call notifications, and a number of fitness features. They also demoed the TalkBand B2 and TalkBand N1, which they say are designed for the business-person on the run. The TalkBand B2 received somewhat mixed reviews for its ability to be transformed into a Bluetooth earpiece.

LG launched two watches, the LG Watch Urbane, and the Watch Urbane LTE. The Urbane is stylish, and has a look which many find competitive with designer watches – for those who have, thus far, found the wearable device market to be somewhat lacking in beauty. It also claims a longer battery life than any Android Wear device to date.

arstechnica.com

The LTE, due to its mobile payment capability, uses webOS rather than Android Wear. It was perhaps a little early for both devices to be presented, but LG knew this, and gambled that getting something out there would be better than nothing, in order to have a chance of competing with Apple.

Apps

IBM announced that they have come up with another three iOS apps to add to the ten released last year, as part of their partnership with Apple.

RefMe – an app that has intrigued the Fivebars team for some time now – won best British mobile startup for its free student referencing app. Look out for more on this in an upcoming blog post about some of the best apps for students and academics.

There’s also a new messaging app – YO! – already available on Android devices. It may seem to many to be an already saturated market, but YO!’s offline capabilities make it a potentially major player in the likes of Bangladesh (where it was beta-tested), where limited data plans and slow connections mean that file-sharing isn’t as quick and easy as it is in the west.

Phones

MWC15 saw the 20^th Annual Global Mobile Awards, at which over 35 awards were given out in different categories. The phones that stood out were the Apple iPhone 6, and the LG G3 – joint winners of “Best Smartphone” as well as the Motorola Moto E, winner of “Best Low-Cost Smartphone.” Unsurprisingly it was the Samsung Galaxy 6 Edge which won “Best New Handset, Tablet, or Device.”

Honourable mention

As a company who specialise in finding the best mobile phone deal for our business customers, we are always on the lookout for anything that might streamline our work day. As such, IKEA wins our award! Beginning next month, the Swedish furniture company will be selling lamps and tables with Qi wireless charging pads – meaning no more wires everywhere to trip over.

Let’s Talk About Six, Baby…

The past fortnight has been a busy time in the world of mobile phones – we’ve seen the launch of Samsung’s latest Galaxy products, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and of course the Apple Watch and Apple Watch Edition. In the next few blog posts we’ll offer our take on the various gadgets being released this year, and what they will offer to the business world.

A galaxy not so far away

The first major launch event of the season was for the Samsung Galaxy S6, and the S6 Edge. There have been rumours, leaks, and suspicions for months about these latest additions to the Galaxy line. After the disappointing sales of the S5, most industry commentators felt that Samsung needed to do something different. And they most certainly did.

The first thing that you’ll notice about the S6 and the S6 Edge is the design. Samsung have eschewed their slightly plasticky go-to look, and modernised the S6 with a glass and metal handset. This was a necessary move, as the high-end product no longer matched its less-than-premium feel. It is still light, weighing in at around 138g – the equivalent of about 14 or 15 pound coins, and just five grams heavier than the S5. The iPhone 6 weighs 129g, and the 6 Plus, 172g. Of these four handsets, the S6 Edge – weighing 32g – offers the best size to weight ratio, due to the curved edges.

Plus ça change

Obviously, when you are making such changes to an already established line, there will be some dissent. The more new features, and the greater the risk.

Some of the new features in the S6 and the Edge were definite crowd-pleasers at the launch event. Both handsets offer fast WPC and PMA wireless charging; the S6 will give four hours of use after just ten minutes of charging, and can charge from 0-100% in around half the time of the iPhone 6.

The potential downside to this is that Samsung have done away with the removable battery. It remains to be seen whether this is a feature that users will miss.

As well as the lack of removable battery, the new design does not allow for the addition of extra memory via an SD card, however different capacity handsets are available. There have also been a few comments regarding the lack of stylus for the S6, but with the modern curved sides of the Edge, the consensus in the Fivebars office is that a stylus would look outdated and old-fashioned next to such a clean, metal and glass design.

The question on everybody’s lips is “how much will it cost?” As is common with tech launches, Samsung did not indicate a price – it is likely that they want to gauge reception first. Nonetheless, at least one company are taking pre-orders for the S6 for £579. As with any mobile phone, the price will depend very much on the deal, and the dealer. For the best in business mobile contracts, contact us.

Fab Phablets

In the world of mobile phones, you learn to get used to some pretty strange words: smartphone, apps, LOL. In fact, ‘mobile phone’ itself wasn’t added to the OED until 2001 (for reference, an over-breakfast-office-poll suggested that 2000 was about the average year for most of us to get our first mobile phones). However, when it comes to brand new words, ‘phablet’ just about takes the biscuit.

Will it catch on?

‘Phablet’ is what’s known as a portmanteau – a blended word made up of two other words. In general, these sorts of blended words become very popular in the English language, as they are able to express a concept that is often greater than the sum of its parts. Think about the following examples:

• Blaxploitation (black/exploitation)
• Brunch (breakfast/lunch)
• Chillax (chill/relax)
• Cosplay (costume/play)
• Craptacular (crap/spectacular)
• Frenemy (friends/enemy)
• Gaydar (gay/radar)
• Metrosexual (metropolitan/heterosexual)
• Mockumentary (mock/documentary)

We don’t need to know much more than the contributing words to grasp the concept.

But what is a phablet?

It’s a cross between a phone and a tablet, of course!

The phablet emerged from a growing market for smartphones that could encompass ever greater aspects of our lives. We want to carry one device that will be our office, our studio, our entertainment system, and our communications hub. 

The first viable and successful phablet is generally thought to be the 2011 Samsung Galaxy Note, which came with a larger-then-usual 5.3 inch screen. The whole Note series has been remarkably successful, increasing in screen size, stylus functionality, and processing power with each release. The Note 4 has a 5.7 inch screen, a 16MP camera, and was accompanied in release by the curve-finished Note 4 Edge. The Edge packs a whopping 2.7GHz quad-core processor.

The best way to see how the most popular phablets compare is by using them, but that is not a viable option for most people. Hopefully the table below can give you some idea of the performance capabilities of the iPhone6Plus, the Galaxy Note 4, and Google’s Nexus 6.

iPhone6+	Note 4	Nexus 6
5.5 inch screen	5.7 inch screen	5.9 inch screen
1920x1080 pixel resolution	2560x1440 pixel resolution	2560x1440 pixel resolution
1.4GHz processor	2.7GHz processor	2.7GHz processor
1GB RAM	3GB RAM	3GB RAM
16GB, 64GB, 128GB non-expandable internal memory	16GB, 64GB, expandable to 128GB internal memory	32GB, 64GB non-expandable internal memory

A table can’t tell you everything, of course. For example, both the Note 4 and Nexus 6 may have a higher screen resolution, using the sharper-looking HD AMOLED screen, but the iPhone’s HD LCD screen uses less power. Also, the iPhone may have less processing power, but they actually require less power, dues to their highly streamlined design, and user experience.

But will the phablet catch on?

There’s little doubt that the popularity of the phablet is only going to grow over the next few years. Galaxy are about to release their much-hyped Galaxy S6, with the accompanying Edge, and here at Fivebars we’ve got our eye on some of the smartphones and phablets coming out of China. Whatever your chosen brand, we can definitely provide you with the best deal for your business phones.