By Jamie Barrie S eems like there are going to be a few more low cost smartphone options for North American consumers coming out of China. This will give mobile phone cus- tomers who traditionally look to either Apple’s iPhone or Samsung’s Galaxy series when looking to upgrade their phones. We are seeing some impressive offerings coming out of China from companies like OnePlus, Xiaomi and Huawei with phones powered by Google’s Android Platform that are every bit as attractive, powerful and feature-rich as their more mainstream competitors at much lower prices, causing customers to takes notice of these brands as an option when looking to upgrade their phones. In the case of Huawei, they recently ran a successful and aggressive
marketing campaign targeting viewers of “Hockey Night in Canada” as the lead sponsor of the show, which draws millions of views over the NHL regular season, playoffs and Stanley Cup championship series. The one drawback for American customers is that the majority of these devices only work on AT&T or T-Mobile’s networks. So if you’re a Sprint or Verizon customer, you are unfor- tunately not going to be able to take advantage of these lower cost options. In Canada where the Huawei campaign targeted mobile for users this is not the case with more major providers offering these phone options on their networks and offer strong incentives to draw customers with the price point. In addition to price point each of these new handsets out of China have feature offerings that you are not going to find on your iPhone or Galaxy. OnePlus’s 3T handset is a high-powered device with a ridiculous 6GB of RAM and a gorgeous 5.5-inch AMOLED screen. Huawei’s P9 handset offers a dual-camera setup with both monochrome and color sensors designed to capture a greater amount of light in poor lighting conditions, which is a must have for those professional selfie takers. Lenovo’s Motorola G5 has some amazing features and is like a laptop in a handset with a 5.2-inch display, an 8-core processor and 12-MP camera, which will allow for some serious picture taking and for only $229.00 USD. This is all good news for consumers and bad for iPhone and Samsung as those in the market for a new smartphone will not have to stay with Apple or Samsung to get great features from the Chinese handset makers and save some serious cash in the process.
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JULY 2017 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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