Smartphone Huawei vs Xiaomi

Accumulator

In the Xiaomi model range, only the compact flagships of the Mi series are equipped with “ordinary” batteries. Redmi budget phones and more expensive phablets are equipped with increased capacity batteries, while maintaining an acceptable case thickness. The competitor is not so smooth with this, and along with tenacious devices, gadgets with mediocre autonomy are also sold.

High price

Since the company entered the cohort of giants, it has begun to set appropriate prices. Despite the Chinese origin, they ask for gadgets, as for purebred Koreans. Not everyone is ready to buy a Chinese at the price of Samsung, and this is a significant disadvantage of the company. Of course, a “gray” device will cost less, you can also save money by buying a device in China on some “Ali”. But then two pluses at once (official support and 100% compatibility with operators) become irrelevant.

cameras huawei

These phones boast advanced cameras built with Leica. And it’s not about the number of megapixels and photo resolution – Leica offers mobile cameras with high light sensitivity, which allows you to take high-quality photos even in the dead of night. The feature is noted in their reviews by DXOMark and Verge experts.

Below are the top Huawei models with the best cameras.

Powerful iron

Xiaomi is trying to provide the maximum configuration for the minimum money. In terms of performance, they outperform their equivalent rivals, and flagships regularly get into the TOP 10 of the AnTuTu rating. Frankly cheap Xiaomi chipsets are usually not used, the only budget quad-core in their current lineup is Redmi 4A, with a price of less than $100.

Lack of a centralized promotion strategy

The company’s activities give the impression that it does not have a well-defined long-term development strategy. Huawei clearly distinguishes between the lineup, making devices of different categories, and moving forward confidently. And Xiaomi seems to randomly grab every chance to quickly increase sales, releasing interesting, but sometimes very similar models that create internal competition.

The result of such a chaotic release of models, when some quite successful devices go through several reincarnations, and no one is in a hurry to listen to users and eliminate the real disadvantages of other handsets, confusion occurs. As a result, the impression of good devices is spoiled by less successful models, and sorting out the assortment can be difficult.

Official representations

There are official representative offices of Huawei in Russia and Ukraine, while Xiaomi is represented only by dealer companies. The presence of branches allows better adaptation of products to these markets and the provision of official technical support. In the end, repairing Huawei under warranty is easier and faster than Xiaomi, and in this light, the gadgets clearly look better.

Problems with oleophobic coating

It sounds very strange, but Huawei has some kind of pathological dislike for the oleophobic coating. The absence of a water-repellent coating is argued either by the poor performance of the fingerprint scanner under the screen (as in P10), or by the insufficiently high status of the device (as in the aforementioned GT3). Xiaomi has an average coverage (it comes off after about six months of active use, but it’s better than without it), but it is available on all models.

Problems with debugging

By releasing many similar devices with different hardware, Xiaomi complicates the task for its software developers. As a result, they do not always have time to quickly fix bugs, it is enough to optimize the software with high quality. And the parallel use of components from different manufacturers makes the task of creating an ideal firmware impossible in practice.

Software support

At this point, the companies are on an equal footing, with a minimal margin in favor of Xiaomi. Both systems – MIUI from Xiaomi and EMUI from Huawei – are constantly updated, bringing chips even to old gadgets.

A comparison of the main parameters of the systems is given in the table below.

Firmware confusion.

Along with a not very clear update of the model range, there are also misunderstandings with the firmware. Some phones are being let in ready for global sales, with international firmware, a full package of languages ​​and Google software. Others are released only for China, as a result, for sales outside of China, sellers reflash them to unofficial OS builds, due to which most glitches happen. Why the same Redmi 4 Prime received a global firmware, but Redmi 4 did not, remains a mystery.

Chipsets

MediaTek chipsets are one of the main problems of Xiaomi. The question of why they are still used, when there are more optimized Qualcomm counterparts that are better, remains a mystery. No matter how hard the Taiwanese company tries, it fails to create suitable chips with a class above the average, state employees remain its element.

And even if it does, everything is spoiled by a strange update release policy. It is through the fault of the hot SoCs of the Helio series that stereotypes arise about Xiaomi smartphones heating up and always entering the throttling mode (performance reduction for better cooling), which still do not receive timely OS updates.

Chipsets of own production

Almost all Honor models use chipsets of their own production – Kirin.

This has clear merits:

1. The group that develops the new smartphone works closely with the group that develops the new chipset, which improves compatibility and, as a result, the performance of the device.
2. There is no dependency on suppliers.
3. Any bugs and shortcomings are quickly eliminated thanks to good optimization and access to processor development.
4. Updates are released quickly.
5. It’s not as expensive as buying chipsets from a third-party manufacturer, so the price of the company’s gadgets is lower than it could be.

Chips from media tek

Media Tek chipsets, used in most Xiaomi models (more often in budget models), perform worse than Qualcomm chipsets. Media Tech overheats, skips cycles and may “sag” when working in “heavy” games and applications. This is a partial drawback as models released this year ship with Snapdragon chipsets.