Profiling Chinese Low-cost Smartphone Vendors - Innos

Today marks the beginning of a series of (hopefully I can hang on to it till at least the 2nd profile) profiles of lesser internationally known Chinese smartphone vendors. The purpose of this series is to document the growing popularity of $100-$200 smartphones coming out of China. I believe this is a multi-year trend that will greatly benefit consumers, service providers, software developers, and hardware manufacturers.

The term "1000 RMB" smartphone has been in the media for over 2 quarters. We talk about often but rarely do we see a capable model on the market yet. Right now. perhaps the "1,500 RMB smartphone" is the better name for those low-cost smartphones that are equipped with more than adequate chipsets, small innovative designs (more to discuss later), and rapid design cycles. Further, if you are willing to spend double the 1,000 RMB, you get a powerful "2,000 RMB smartphone" with performance on par with middle-upper tier major brands. Of course, user experience and design quality are often lacking comparing to leading OEMs such as Samsung or Apple. But we should nevertheless note that some major OEMs are paying attention to this segment: mostly notably mainland powerhouse such as ZTE, Lenovo and Huawei. Samsung also participate with its Galaxy Y using Broadcom's reference design. (technically Galaxy Y is not participating; but its use of reference design and other cost-conscious specs are very typical of 1,000 RMB smartphone group).

There comes the Innos, a lesser known mainland brand. (your humble writer got to know this name about 12 hours before starting to write this piece). The brand is targeting the university students, each of the three models (low end, mid end, and high end) has its own features that differentiated the model and caters to the needs of the target customers.

The beginning level a35 uses the Qualcomm MSM 7227t platform with 800MHz (Snapdragon S-1, entry level SoC based on ARM11). 7227 is a much older chipset in the Snapdragon family. Released in 2008, it is perhaps one of the most popular Snapdragons. Notable models that also have 7227 are HTC Legend, HTC Wildfire S, Huawei Sonic, Palm Pixi, T-Mobile MyTouch Slide, ZTE Blade, Galaxy Ace. But the 7227t is a much up-to-date, improved version of 7227 released in the second half of 2011. As a QRD (Qualcomm Reference Design) platform, it corrected a lot of the flaws in 7227, and added the support for Flash 10. It also preceded 7227a (in I5) by about a quarter.

The popularity of 7227 and its improvement 7227t has made Innos i35 a relatively low risk model to take on. i35 features lossless audio playback and dual headphone outlet - a rather fitting feature considering how often college students couple listening music together when they spend time together in the library or the self-study rooms. This gentle emphasis on music playback ability and quality is universal across all three Innos models.Also notably is that even this low end model has both front and back facing cameras. Perhaps again catering to the need of college sweethearts. At roughly $125 (799RMB), this value proposition is hardly matched.

Next in line is I5 with 7227a. Now 7227a is a major upgrade to 7227. It is based on Cortex A5 and has a much better GPU. I5 looks like a sufficiently powerful "smartphone": with all the usual bells and whistles: a nice, large screen (comparable in resolution to HTC Evo 4G - 217 ppi), powerful AP, thin form, dual cameras, 3-axis accelerometer, upgradable to Ice cream Sandwich. Surprisingly, this is a dual-model phone. In my opinion, if Innos made it single mode phone and cut the price down further more, this would be the ideal "1,000RMB" phone. The music feature on the phone is a better speaker and Yamaha DSP.

The top-of-the-line D9 is an insane model. Snapdragon S4, OGS 4.3-inch Sharp screen (256ppi, equivalent to Droid Bionic), 8MP rear camera, dual mode, and behold! a battery with 4160mAh! enough juice to standby for 1000 hours (or talk for 40 hours). The missing spec you normally found elsewhere on higher-end models are: better front facing camera (D9 has a VGA .3MP camera), gyroscopes (important for gaming), and bigger NAND storage. But at $285 (1799RMB), I guess none of these lacking features is a deal breaker.

I have not laid my hands on any of these phones. Therefore all comments are pure speculations on my part, based on the very limited knowledge I have. I merely want to illustrate how far some 2-tier and 3-tier Chinese vendors have gone to make affordable and capable smartphones. This is truly the spirit of our time. It reminds me of how Chinese have brought low cost home appliance, (CRT TVs, microwave, DVD players, notebook computers) to the world.