With innovation, great specs and a wide range of options, Chinese-made smartphones are no longer considered to be cheap copies. Here is a list of five Chinese-made smartphones that offer maximum bang for their buck.
There is no doubt that Chinese phones offer excellent value for money. With a wealth of smartphone manufacturing experience, China has steadily moved from being a hotbed of cheap copies of popular handsets to genuinely innovative and alternative handsets, producing phones of higher specification and build quality than their Western counterparts, and at a much cheaper price.
According to the IDC, sales of Chinese smartphones grew exponentially in 2015, a fact that must be unsettling to traditional big guns like Samsung and Apple.
So which are the phones/brands that will be shaking things up in the next decade. Here are the top five.
Xiaomi
Commonly referred to as the "Apple of China", Xiaomi, founded in 2010, churned out 19 million smartphones in 2013 and has rapidly risen to become one of the leading tech firms in its homeland.
It's Mi 5 series is one of the most impressive – with a powerful Snapdragon 820 system chip and a feature-rich MIUI custom skin on top of Android 6, the Mi 5 is solidly put together and its new 4-axis optical image stabilization system wowed the world at MWC 2016.
It's Mi Note, however, is considered to be its flagship phone. With its trim design, powerful hardware and camera, the Mi Note is a premium high-end phone that sets the benchmark for the company's upcoming flagships, all while selling at a much more affordable price than competing phablets.
Huawei
Huawei had phenomenal growth last year, finishing as the world's third-largest phone maker behind giants like Samsung and Apple. Its Honor series is testament to the company's ambition of establishing itself as a serious player in the premium smartphone game, with its latest Honor 7 handset offering octa-core CPU, a svelte metallic design and an excellent rear-facing camera. The P9, however, is its most important phone for 2016, carrying flagship status and offering an innovative dual rear camera setup, Android Marshmallow right out of the box, internal memory of 32 GB (expandable) and a 3,000 mAh battery.
One Plus
Founded in December 2013, the company's first device, the OnePlus One, created quite the furor. In fact, it wouldn't be completely inaccurate to say that OnePlus took the smartphone market by storm when the OnePlus One arrived in June 2014. Since then the brand's high-quality products with simplistic, user-friendly designs have more than shone through.
Its OnePlus 2 loaded with the best hardware available, is being boldly called the Flagship Killer" and picks up where its predecessor left off. The OnePlus 3, too, comes fully loaded with a list of great specs, including a 5.5″ FHD AMOLED display, Snapdragon 820 processor, 6GB of RAM, 64GB UFS 2.0 storage (no MicroSD slot, either), 3,000mAh battery, 16-megapixel camera, 8-megapixel front-facing camera, and OxygenOS running atop the latest publicly available version of Android.
Meizu
Many typical smartphone buyers will never have heard of Meizu, but the company is beginning to grab headlines fast. The company's latest device, the Meizu Pro 5, is comparable to the Samsung Galaxy S6 on the inside, with both devices sporting Samsung's excellent octa-core Exynos 7420 Octa chipset clocked at 2.1GHz, a 21 MP camera, 3 GB or 4 GB of RAM, front-mounted fingerprint scanner, 5.7-inch Full HD display, Android Lollipop and solid 3,000 mAh battery. Unlike the Galaxy S6, however, the Meizu Pro 5 also comes with expandable storage and up to 4GB RAM, although it's also a slightly more unwieldy device at 5.7 inches.
Lenovo
Founded in Beijing in 1984, Lenovo acquired IBM's PC business in 2005, becoming the world's top PC maker by 2013. In 2011, it entered the Android and Windows tablet market and began selling Android smartphones in 2012. Its latest mobile launch (July 2016), the Vibe A comes with a 4-inch touchscreen display, Android 5.1 and is powered by a 1700mAh removable battery.
Its Vibe P1 though comes with a 4,900 mAh battery ...almost double the size of what most other smartphones offer right now – and delivers super fast-charging technology to get that monster battery charged pronto, as well as a fingerprint scanner, 5.5-inch Full HD display and Android Lollipop.
