Compare smartphones Asus and Xiaomi

Accord­ing to mar­ket research for the first quar­ter of 2019, two of the top three smart­phone man­u­fac­tur­ers are locat­ed in Chi­na. And this is not sur­pris­ing. Chi­nese smart­phone man­u­fac­tur­ers man­age to pro­duce simul­ta­ne­ous­ly mul­ti­func­tion­al, reli­able and inex­pen­sive devices that are more than “afford­able” for most peo­ple.

And one of the lead­ing places in the “peo­ple’s rat­ing” of smart­phone man­u­fac­tur­ers is occu­pied by Xiao­mi. Its Red­mi line is inex­pen­sive, but not dis­gust­ing, and the Mi series embod­ies all the most mod­ern tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions on the mar­ket.

How­ev­er, now Asus is on its heels. This man­u­fac­tur­er has long set­tled on the Euro­pean mar­ket and is there­fore much more famil­iar to the domes­tic user. And the prices for Asus smart­phones are also attrac­tive — even for flag­ship devices.

As a result, a per­son who decides to “update the technopark” may have a fair ques­tion: which smart­phone is bet­ter to take — Asus or Xiao­mi? Let’s take a look at this mate­r­i­al.

Asus smartphones

Asus is far from new to the smart­phone mar­ket. True, there was a rather trag­ic moment in her sto­ry when she had to restart the mobile busi­ness. It hap­pened in 2017.

Until 2017, Asus active­ly exper­i­ment­ed with smart­phones. So, once she released the Zen­Fone Self­ie, which was equipped with a 16-megapix­el front cam­era. And her Zen­Fone Laser fea­tured a cam­era with a laser focus­ing sys­tem, a first on the mar­ket.

How­ev­er, not all exper­i­ments were so suc­cess­ful. For exam­ple, she once released sev­er­al devices on the Intel Atom proces­sor. This chip was com­plete­ly unsuit­able for use with the Android oper­at­ing sys­tem, so the devices “slowed down”, “bug­gy”, heat­ed up and did not meet their price at all. And she reg­u­lar­ly “scored” on the sup­port of released smart­phones, with­out offer­ing firmware or secu­ri­ty updates for them.

As a result, these con­tro­ver­sial exper­i­ments “buried” Asus’ phone busi­ness, and the com­pa­ny was forced to restart it. After the “restart”, the smart­phones of this brand have become com­plete­ly stan­dard and even bor­ing. There is noth­ing “catchy” in the new devices, they only meet cur­rent trends in the mobile device mar­ket.

On the oth­er hand, Asus has cor­rect­ed itself, and its new smart­phones deserve to be called at least good. High-per­for­mance ener­gy-effi­cient Snap­drag­on chips are used as a proces­sor even in bud­get options, screens have excel­lent pix­el den­si­ty and col­or repro­duc­tion for 2018–2019, and cam­eras shoot at a fair­ly high lev­el. Not Google Pix­el, of course, but also very good.

The main advan­tage of Asus smart­phones in com­par­i­son with Xiao­mi can be attrib­uted to the oper­at­ing sys­tem. Their firmware dif­fers lit­tle from stock Android, but is com­ple­ment­ed by sev­er­al nice fea­tures. A built-in quick note tool, the abil­i­ty to install a vari­ety of themes, pleas­ant pas­tel col­ors of the inter­face — all this makes Asus smart­phones “com­fort­able” to use.

The reli­a­bil­i­ty of the devices is also at a very high lev­el. The com­pa­ny uses high-end man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ties and assem­bly tech­nolo­gies, thanks to which the devices are durable, and the rejec­tion rate is reduced to zero.

But the design of smart­phones is quite con­tro­ver­sial. While oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers are active­ly exper­i­ment­ing with col­or gra­di­ents, shades of the north­ern lights and glass backs, Asus remains true to the same style. Her smart­phones are equipped with a met­al back pan­el with cir­cu­lar pol­ish­ing and, accord­ing­ly, a char­ac­ter­is­tic sheen. Such a design deci­sion can both “fall in love with you at first sight” and cause hos­til­i­ty.

But Asus nev­er fixed one mis­take. Her smart­phones still receive lit­tle to no updates. Of course, it has already embarked on a fix — for exam­ple, Asus Zen­Fone 5Z entered the beta test­ing pro­gram for the Android 10.0 Q oper­at­ing sys­tem — but the steps are ten­ta­tive. So, smart­phones of the 2017 mod­el have not yet received Android 9.0 Pie.

So, let’s sum up.

Design is a rather sub­jec­tive con­cept, so for some, a met­al back with cir­cu­lar pol­ish­ing may seem very beau­ti­ful, but for oth­ers, they will not like it at all.

Xiaomi smartphones

Xiao­mi has gained fame pri­mar­i­ly due to the low price of its smart­phones. Even in 2016–2017, when $300 was the aver­age cost of a device from the “bud­get” seg­ment, this man­u­fac­tur­er active­ly “stamped” devices with a price tag of 150–200 US cur­ren­cy units. And these ultra-cheap smart­phones turned out to be quite good in prac­tice!

Take, for exam­ple, Xiao­mi Red­mi 3. This bud­get smart­phone cost $150–200 and at the same time offered excel­lent auton­o­my thanks to a 4000 mAh bat­tery, good per­for­mance due to an opti­mized Medi­aTek proces­sor and 3 GB of RAM, as well as sup­port for LTE. Some­thing from Sam­sung with sim­i­lar char­ac­ter­is­tics would cost twice as much at best.

In 2015–2017, Xiao­mi lit­er­al­ly floods the mar­ket with its bud­get smart­phones. It turns out 2–3 new devices per month, which dif­fer lit­tle from each oth­er. But the low price makes them very attrac­tive to cus­tomers.

And since 2018, Xiao­mi “takes up the mind.” There are few­er devices, and each of them is some­how dif­fer­ent from the oth­er. In addi­tion, the com­pa­ny begins to con­quer the seg­ment of “super-cheap flag­ships”. So, price tags of $300–400 are received by top devices Xiao­mi Pocoph­o­ne F1, Xiao­mi Mi A2, Xiao­mi Red­mi K2 Pro — they are all based on pow­er­ful proces­sors, equipped with a large amount of RAM and per­ma­nent mem­o­ry, and sup­port the most mod­ern tech­nolo­gies.

In gen­er­al, at the moment Xiao­mi occu­pies a rather inter­est­ing niche — ultra-cheap flag­ships. Devices with a price tag of up to $ 400 in terms of func­tion­al­i­ty, per­for­mance and tech­ni­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics may well com­pete with smart­phones from com­peti­tors that cost well if twice as much.

Of course, she also had bud­get devices for $ 100 in her assort­ment. And they are also head and shoul­ders above com­peti­tors in the same price range.

But not all is well. Xiao­mi smart­phones have a cou­ple of seri­ous prob­lems.

The first and fore­most is the MIUI oper­at­ing sys­tem. This firmware is based on Android, but it has been rad­i­cal­ly redesigned. And the prob­lem is not only in non-stan­dard user expe­ri­ence, no. MIUI con­tains many minor bugs, which, more­over, are not repro­duced. That is, at some point, the smart­phone can “switch off”, and it’s not crit­i­cal, just an error will occur, but it won’t be pos­si­ble to repeat it.

In addi­tion, MIUI comes pre-installed with ad-sup­port­ed apps. Ban­ners are shown even in such stan­dard tools as an activ­i­ty track­er or a file man­ag­er. And get­ting rid of them will not work, because adver­tis­ing is sewn at the sys­tem lev­el.

Also, pre-installed appli­ca­tions are intru­sive. “Accept the user agree­ment”, “Accept the pri­va­cy pol­i­cy”, “Log in to Mi Account”, “Time to clear tem­po­rary data”, “We made a col­lage of your pho­tos”… every day the user will be dis­tract­ed by at least 2–3 noti­fi­ca­tions from pre-installed appli­ca­tions.

The sec­ond prob­lem is sav­ings on com­po­nents. To make smart­phones cheap, Xiao­mi some­times installs very low cost mod­ules in them, which, of course, neg­a­tive­ly affect the user expe­ri­ence.

For exam­ple, Xiao­mi Mi A1 has a dis­gust­ing screen — dim and with a grid of sen­sors vis­i­ble even with­out glass­es. Pocoph­o­ne F1 also has a prob­lem with the dis­play — the back­light is uneven, the low­er right cor­ner is very “high­light­ed”. On the Red­mi 3, the cam­era is slow, and as a result, the pic­tures of your favorite cats are too blur­ry — even if the four-legged friend did not spin. Mi Mix 3 has a qui­et speak­er, you can not hear the call from your pock­et, not to men­tion your purse.

In gen­er­al, the prob­lems are small, but unpleas­ant.

And a few more words about updates. All Xiao­mi smart­phones reg­u­lar­ly receive firmware updates. Even very old ones. Of course, the lat­est ver­sions of the oper­at­ing sys­tem are not avail­able for them, but minor fix­es and secu­ri­ty updates are com­ing out.

Of course, updates are not always exclu­sive­ly enjoy­able. For exam­ple, in MIUI 10 there is no mail client from MIUI 9. Prob­a­bly, it’s a shame for those peo­ple who installed the update, and all con­fig­ured mail­box­es dis­ap­peared …

It is impor­tant to note one more point. There are two ver­sions of Xiao­mi smart­phone firmware — Chi­nese and Glob­al. The first is intend­ed exclu­sive­ly for the domes­tic Chi­nese mar­ket, that is:

1. 1. It may sim­ply not have the Euro­pean lan­guage;

       

 

1. 1. The smart­phone may not catch the net­work (for exam­ple, 4G LTE);

       

 

1. 1. It does not have the Play Mar­ket — an appli­ca­tion store, with­out which the phone becomes use­less.

       

 

There­fore, when order­ing a Xiao­mi smart­phone on some AliEx­press, make sure that it comes in the Glob­al ver­sion.

Comparison and which is better to take?

So, Asus smart­phones are reli­able, durable and com­fort­able to use — but at the same time they are quite expen­sive and are updat­ed once in a while (and the prod­uct range also has a good dozen mod­els), and Xiao­mi are cheap, updat­ed reg­u­lar­ly and with good tech­ni­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics for their price. — but at the same time full of small both soft­ware and hard­ware bugs.

But the dif­fer­ence between the two brands is not lim­it­ed to this.

 

Char­ac­ter­is­tic	Asus	Xiao­mi
Price pol­i­cy	Mid­dle and top seg­ments	Bud­get and mid­dle seg­ments
Cur­rent assort­ment	About a dozen mod­els	Sev­er­al dozen mod­els
Char­ac­ter­is­tics	Always on the lat­est hard­ware plat­form	“Mixed”, avail­able both on cur­rent plat­forms and on out­dat­ed ones
Firmware	Almost pure Android with a min­i­mum of mod­i­fi­ca­tions	MIUI is a deeply redesigned Android with a huge num­ber of changes
Firmware updates	Rare	Fre­quent but not always good

So what to choose? And here it is bet­ter to start from the price:

1. 1. Bud­get up 150$ — Xiao­mi;

       

 

1. 1. From 150 to 200$ — Asus;

       

 

1. 1. From 200 to 350$ — Xiao­mi;

       

 

1. 1. More than 350 $ — Asus.

       

 

If you choose in this way, you will get a device with the high­est per­for­mance and excel­lent user expe­ri­ence.

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