I took the plunge and got away from my $20 phone and picked up a $300 straight from China model. I picked this one up and have to say I'm pretty impressed. Full HD, gorilla glass, rooted etc. http://www.pandawill.com/umi-x2-smartphone-50-inch-1080p-fhd-screen-gorilla-glass-2g-32g-mtk6589-quad-core-android-42-grey-p74767.html
Thought I would post this after seeing the tablet thread in this section.
Now I just need to figure out how to use the darn thing. Amazing how powerful these phones are getting!
Those are pretty good specs for something that fell off the back of a truck. ;)
I wonder how the hardware would fare head-to-head with one of the brand name monsters it cloned.
You're lucky in the Thai market as the carriers obviously don't care what hardware you run. Even if I bought one of those I couldn't use it in Japan. I might be able to get an overpriced voice plan with no data, but who uses voice these days?!
You have a fairly new version of Android too. You might want to ask them when they'll let you upgrade to 4.2.2.
If you're feeling adventurous, and before you set the thing up too much, you may want to root the device. That would let you upgrade to a different ROM if you were so inclined down-the-road.
>>Amazing how powerful these phones are getting!
In the 1980s in the US, Seymour Cray and Co developed the Cray II, the most amazing supercomputer on the planet. The thing was so powerful that it was able to model nuclear explosions and that's why Reagan signed the nuclear test ban treaty. It meant the US could still "test" nuclear devices and yet sign a treaty that made that impossible for the Soviets who couldn't touch that computing capacity. It is sometimes called "the computer that won the cold war" with a blazing peak performance of about 1.9 GFLOPS/sec
Now the iPad 2, running on one of it's two processors, is just as fast.
The iPhone 5 as shipped by Apple can pull 25 GFLOPS/sec.
To recap:
- supercomputer that won the Cold War: 1.9 GFLOPS/sec
- iPhone 5: 25 GFLOPS/sec
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/the-ipad-in-your-hand-as-fast-as-a-supercomputer-of-yore/?_r=0
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6324/the-iphone-5-performance-preview
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2