All about Chinese mobiles: main brands and stores

Range phones with high-end features for less than 200 euros. Discover why Chinese mobiles are becoming more and more fashionable in Spain

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The chinese mobiles are a great savings opportunity since brands such as Jiayu, Meizu or Xiaomi offer powerful features at surprisingly low prices, and that is why they are being sold more and more in Spain. If you are interested in buying a Chinese mobile, in this guide we cover everything you need to know: advantages and disadvantages, main brands, where and how to buy it, tips for buying a Chinese mobile and which are the best sellers.

The good and the bad of Chinese mobiles

In the current market there is great competition in the sale of mobile phones. On the one hand, we find the features of phones like Samsung or Apple while, on the other, we find similar features at very low prices like those offered by Chinese mobiles. We break down, below, the main advantages and disadvantages of chinese mobiles:

Advantages

• Price. They are very cheap smartphones, so it makes it easier to get a terminal with greater features than what we could normally afford with the same budget in popular brands.
• Dual SIM. It is the best market to search for dual SIM mobiles since it is a very common feature among Chinese mobiles.

Drawbacks

• hard to get. Many stores are not translated (or well translated) into Spanish, it is necessary to send a shipment from far away, communication is not as fluid as with a traditional store… Precisely because of the above, you will hardly be able to test the mobile before buying it, unless you are lucky enough to have it in a physical store that you know of.
• Poorer materials and components (although not always). The materials (such as the casing or the glass) may be of lower quality than those of a mid-range from Sony or Samsung, for example. But this does not always happen, since there are very good quality Chinese mobiles and logically there are also ranges within the Chinese market.
• connectivity. It is necessary that the frequency bands of the telephone antennas are compatible with the networks of your country (here is a guide on the matter). In many cases the GPS gives problems too.
• warranty claim. As with shipping, if you have to claim the warranty or request a repair, the phone has to travel halfway around the world and the process takes a long time. This type of inconvenience is minimized if we buy the phone in a service in conventional online stores or in a neighborhood store.

Main Chinese mobile brands

Do they ring a bell? Xiaomi, Meizu, Jiayu, THL…? These are some of the Chinese brands that in recent years have been growing in popularity outside the borders of the great Asian country. In particular, Xiaomi with its Red Rice and its highly popular Miui Android customization, or Meizu and its amazing eight-core terminals. The latter used to make high-end phones and is now expanding into the mid-range.

They have also been quite successful in sales. elephone, Cubot and THLand have set a trend in the high-end one plus and Oppoready to “kill” the flagship smartphones of the big manufacturers.

They may sound like something to you Lenovo, ZTE and Huawei, which have been making a name for themselves on the shelves of large stores in Spain for some time now. Huawei, which also manufactures routers and other IT solutions, is the star of Chinese mobiles in the West, and its high-end mobiles stand out. But we must not forget that Lenovo, another of the most international, bought Motorola from Google, so it also takes center stage.

As for ZTE, it is another of the usual Chinese brands in Spanish stores, and its prices are a little above those of other Chinese manufacturers, but they are still very cheap. Its Nubia range, very pampered, is almost a separate brand.

Well-known Chinese mobile brands

• Cubot. Its cheap prices in the mid-range (around 150 euros) stand out, although it also sells high-end mobile phones for around 400 euros (such as the Cubot X6).
• elephone. Your P3000s incorporates a fingerprint reader, and costs less than 170 euros.
• iOcean. Despite the fact that his iOcean X8 is considered one of the best chinese phones of the yearthe brand is quite unknown in the Asian telephony landscape.
• jiayu. There is a distributor in Spain. His Jiayu S3 stands out.
• king zone. Range not very abundant, but of good quality, for prices around 140 euros.
• Meizu. It used to offer more expensive smartphones (more than 250 euros) but now it has models like the M1 in its catalog, for 169 euros. Another highly demanded terminal is the Meizu MX4, with an extremely thin margin (2.6 mm) in a 5.4-inch smartphone, which makes it an “all screen”.
• No.1. Specialized in mobile clones, such as the vPhone 6 (clone of the iPhone 6) or the No.1 Note 4 (clone of the Galaxy Note 4).
• one plus. For a while, he only marketed one model, the Oneplus One (in two versions of 16 and 64 GB, for 298 and 348 euros respectively) which is available through his website. At the moment they have a mobile with all the specifications of a high-end model, the OnePlus 6T.
• Oppo. For some, the Oppo Find 7 is the best chinese mobile So far: a high-end terminal that stands out for its screen and image quality (one of the first 2K displays on the market). Oppo’s designs are similar to those of Sony’s Xperia range.
• THL. Several of his models wear a Sony sensor camera. Its THL 5000 with 5,000 mAh battery stands out. In addition, the brand has an authorized store in Spain.
• UMI. In this brand with elaborate finishes and designs similar to iPhones 4 or 5 (although thicker), the UMI C1 stands out in the mid-range and the UMI ZERO in the high-end.
• Xiaocai. Curling the loop, the Chinese no longer copy only foreign mobiles but also clone other Chinese mobiles. Xiaocai is one of these cases: it is a Chinese brand clone of another Chinese brand, Xiaomi.
• Xiaomi. It stands out for its clean and careful design, the quality of the materials and its hardware. His Xiaomi Red Rice has been a sales success.
• zopo. This brand mounts Mediatek processors with four and eight cores depending on the range, with price ranges between 100 and 250 euros.

Where to buy Chinese mobiles from Spain

Interested in buy a chinese mobile from Spain? We indicate the different options available to acquire one of these terminals.

In online stores from China

The first idea is to go directly to the official website of the manufacturer (if you make sales from it, like Oneplus or No.1), but you can save by going to Chinese online stores, which have very cheap Chinese mobiles because they offer factory prices without the need to buy wholesale or in large quantities.

One of the best known platforms is aliexpress: basically acts as a mediator between sellers and buyers. You pay for the item immediately but the money is held by Aliexpress, which pays the seller when you receive the product. The advantage is that by competing with each other, it is possible to find very cheap chinese mobiles. In addition, it offers information about the seller, comments from other users who have bought something from him before, reputation, etc.

Some of the biggest are efoxstoreComebuy, Lightinthebox, 234buy, Cheerfulpurchasecoolcool, tinydeal, Dealextreme, Banggood… However, it is difficult to make a specific bet, since each case is different and although there are stores with a track record and reputation, you can read about all of them cases in which there have been problems. Many do not have a Spanish translation or are badly translated.

Chinese websites with warehouses in Spain

Some of these stores have warehouses in Europe: No.1 has in European countries, Comebuy has in Spain, Germany and Italy… so the products have already passed customs and the wait to receive the order is less: if they do not have stock in Spain, they send them from Italy or Germany. Efoxtienda also has shipping from Spain, with Spanish two-year warranty and technical service here. However, its variety is scarcer since they only bring the best sellers.

Geekbuying and Geekvida also have their own section in Spain and there are also Spanish companies from birth, such as PowerPlanet, TudualSIM (which has a physical store in Valencia), TechnoSpain or PcComponents (which has a physical store in Murcia), which are dedicated to importing Asian technology and which, by law, have a Spanish headquarters must offer a two-year guarantee.

In conventional stores

Some Chinese mobiles are sold in large stores (such as mediamarkt), such as some models from ZTE and Huawei. Many can also be found in The Phone House.

Another very good option can be Amazon. The largest online store in the world has mobiles from both leading brands and Chinese manufacturers that we have mentioned in the previous section. In many cases, it may not have the most competitive price, but it is a secure store, with a large global network, in our language, and it makes it easy to claim later if there are problems.

On the other hand, some brands, such as Jiayu, Zopo or THL, have authorized distributors in Spain, which makes it easy to find them. That is why physical stores are beginning to appear in Spain (neighborhood computer storesfor example) that offer Chinese mobiles, with the advantage that you can see them right there, take them with you at that very moment and enjoy the guarantee without problem, but since they are not large chains, they are more difficult to find.

What to take into account when buying Chinese mobiles?

Guarantee

If the store is Chinese, there is usually a 12-month guarantee, while if it is Spanish, the guarantee must be 24 months, according to current legislation.

Keep in mind that changing the ROM or rooting the device invalidates the warranty, as well as tampering with the device and damage such as shocks or water.

If the store is Chinese

Before making a shipment, you must request authorization to return an item (a RMA, Return Merchandise Authorizationmerchandise return authorization), generally by e-mail.

If the product has faults or the contents of the box do not match what was advertised, often it is the customer who must bear the shipping costs. In some stores, the customer only has to take care of them if he returns the product for personal reasons, if he requests a return for a refund (but not for a replacement), and he must pay the shipping costs from Spain to China but not the other way around if they have passed more than 30 days from receipt of the product.

In total, if you have to send the mobile to China for repair, you can say goodbye to it for a long time. Between shipping and repair time: it may take from one month to three months.

If the store is Spanish

Spanish legislation establishes that if during the first six months From the delivery of the good a defect comes to light, it is considered to be a manufacturing fault and the Spanish store must be in charge of all transport costs and the…