Since the launch of their MTK powered Newman K1, Newman have been a little quite, but that is all about to change as leakedphotos of the Newman N3 have finally emerged.
Newman have been manufacturing quality consumer electronics for years, but it has only been the past year and a half that they have taken the plunge and started to produce Android smarpthones.
The current flagship Newman N2, which boasts a 13 mega-pixel rear camera and quad-core Samsung Exynos CPU, has been a while for quite a while and a refresh is expected to hit day now. Whether it will look like the phone in these recent spy photos though is another matter.
Gizchina News of the week
Chinese media are calling the leaked Newman N3 the “Panda” due to the white and black colour scheme. From what we can see in the images the N3 appears to be very similar in design to the JiaYu G4 and the leaked images of the Xiaomi Mi3, even down the aggressively tapered sides.
We know little else about the phone past the design, but we guess that a larger, higher resolution display will be in place along with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. Could the Newman N3 get the latest Octa core Samsung chip found in the S4, or will they head down a Qualcomm Snapdragon route?
Let us know your ideas below!
Just for any potential buyers, I would be wary of Newman. I am not saying their phones are not good, but the team that develops the software is atrocious!
Newman N2 is a major let down when it comes to the OS. It recently got upgraded to Android 4.1, but not many people are using it on a daily basis as it’s really buggy. Also, apparently, samsung forbid newman to release the kernel source – everything is locked down, meaning you can’t really get custom roms. There are people who try to do as much as possible with the official ROM (clean it, remove chinese bloatware, etc.) but chances of getting a proper developer community are slim.
Sadly it’s the Chinese way of thinking – release a rather good product with some bugs, but do nothing to improve it afterwards. You know, you’ll still get thousands if not millions of new buyers for their next model, so why make an effort to keep their customers?
I’ve been living in China for the last 2 years and had some experience with Chinese products. Sadly, the companies producing phones/tablets are not mature enough, in my opinion.
Even the Vivo XPlay that my girlfriend bought. has some really weird thinking behind it. Premium phone? They install shitload of apps on it as system applications so that you can’t remove them. Also, change the default theme of the phone so now the notification bar is white. Well, so what that you cannot see any notification icons as they are supposed to be displayed on a BLACK background and therefore have WHITE icons! Want to access settings? Oops, changed them so that the phone looks like an iPhone clone (really, the UI is heavily influenced by iOS). And changed not only the interface, but also removed some of the options! Developer settings? No, just an option to enable debugging mode but no other options.
Argh… Sorry for the rant, but I am really getting annoyed by the attitude of Chinese companies. I understand they are cheap phones, but some of the decisions they make are not really saving them any money! That’s the most annoying thing. Instead of sticking with stock Android experience and even on screen button bar instead of these capacitive buttons, they waste their time and money to make the experience worse… An who still uses menu button?!?! is the xplay or n2 supporting gingerbread or Android 4.x?
tl;dr: good hardware, poor quality control, even poorer support
You should have had tl;dr first 😛
Most of your problems seem to be opinions. For example, I prefer having capacitive touch buttons on the chin because on screen buttons really eat up the screen real estate. I also use the menu button, quite a lot in fact. The Newman N2 has a really active community on Vondroid.com, and the Jelly Bean update is a leaked beta version, which is supposed to have bugs. I’m happily using my Newman N2 running MIUI, and there haven’t been any problems at all. The Newman K1 is running on Lewa OS, and it’s really smooth, with tonnes of customizability too, like MIUI. Also, regarding bloatware, it’s also present on many other phones, for example the Galaxy S4. Lewa OS even allows you to delete most bloatware apps. I’m not trying to say you’re an idiot, just that most of your problems are opinion based or lack of information.
Is Vondroid.com a reliable source ? There at least 2 sellers who were part of that community who are now out of business – one a chinese seller & the other a UK based company.
I’m can’t wait for your review of the Newman K1 !! Can I ask, where did you find MIUI custom rom for the Newman N2 ?
Oh come on, how about battery problems? There are like six threads on battery issues, with many, many ‘fixes’ that are not really working that well. I understand buttons ‘and even’ was meant to say that this is not that important, just my grieve – sorry for being unclear 🙂 However menu button is just plain wrong 😉
It may be that I’m a bit frustrated lately. But there are problems with the phone:
– battery issues (if I leave the phone plugged in, will it drain during the night and not wake me up for my classes?)
– jb – not possible to get paid apps on the phone
– led notification (the fix shown by xtreamer guys is so easy that you’d think that the phone makers should know about it)
– camera focus issues
It’s been 3 months since they told us the jb is coming soon, I would expect more 🙂
In another comment here I wrote that even though it has some annoying drawbacks, it’s still value for money. But you need to know what you’re doing, to make it work AS IT SHOULD OUT OF THE BOX.
Overall, I might have exaggerated a bit, but not much in my opinion 😉 Maybe I was expecting too much from a phone that cost 1600RMB 🙂
Do you think the situation will have improved ie these brands will be better in 12 – 24 months time ?
I think even now they release great stuff, but it’s inconsistent. One good model, one great model, one mediocre. Or a batch that was not QC properly.
I do think they are getting there, but they are still (in my opinion) very short-sighted.
btw, i wrote a comment about tablets but it looks like the link I put means it needs to be moderated., here’s what I wrote:
I had Gemei G9 and it was also a hit and miss. The first one was bought by my gf and it was very good. Firmware was ok, nothing too good, but it was working all right. I bought one for myself two weeks later. Turns out it was a different batch, and quality control was much worse. Had to send it back to get a replacement. Another one had some faults as well. I’m in China, so returning stuff is not too expensive, but if you’re far away then consider this.
I’m not gonna go into too much details but I think the most important factor here is how much you’d like to tinker with your gadgets. N2 is rubbish when it comes to the software, but I can work my magic around it, so that it is fine. It’s great value for money overall. Would I buy it again? honestly, I don’t know. I think I’d go for nexus 4. But it’s a really close call.
If I were to recommend something then I’d follow these rules:
– buy something from a more renowned brand – think zte, huawei, xiaomi, lenovo, etc. They are still cheap, but you get a quality product for sure
– if you’re willing to risk it a bit, go for something that’s been on the market a few weeks at least, and see how’s the dev community. obviously the hw is important as well
i’d recommend slatedroid (google it :D) for your tablet recommendation. I was thinking about getting a 10inch tablet with rockchip 3188 soc myself, but as a beginner Android developer, nexus device is more safe and I can test all new features on it.
Yes I know about slatedroid, apparently there is a guy on there called Roman, who releases firmware updates, roms etc (correct me if i’m wrong) for various tablets.
What do you think about Cube tablets (apparently they have started producing smartphones too), I was thinking in terms of a tablet either Cube or Ramos ?
@Simon- I’m excited about the K1 review too, I feel it’s way better than the N2 in terms of display quality, OS stability (Lewa OS is one of the best ROMs I have ever used) and overall presentation. Hoping they port Lewa to the N2 and preinstall it on the N3. Also, here’s the link: http://vondroid.com/threads/miui-for-n2.5714/
@Marek G- Try out this ROM bro. http://vondroid.com/threads/basedon0029-extremesimplification-speedexperience-by%E5%BE%AE%E8%BF%9B%E8%A1%8C-%E5%85%94%E6%96%AF%E5%9F%BA.865 9/#.UaomLDgRWMl . Also, completely understand your troubles with the phone, Newman should have made it more stable before releasing it. If you ever need help, I’m right here. 🙂
can’t reply to your comment – yup, Roman is the guy. I’d go with whatever he recommends, I’m not gonna be more helpful than him as I was not really following it for the last two months, as I decided to stick with nexus line.
Checkout MrTasselhof recommendations as well. Basically, do the research first and you will most probably be fine 🙂
I like this anecdote I heard a few years back.
taking place at a technology expo: sony has its stand there. It turns out they have 5 sony lcd displays and 5 unbranded, chinese displays. the sony guy just ask you to compare the screens turns out 5/5 sony displays are great, they are also exactly the same, same colour reproduction, same brightness, etc.
Chinese displays on the other hand are all different. One is definitely broken, 2 are not really that good, 1 is on par with sony and one is even better.
But sony has the consistency and that’s what you’re paying for. Listening to guys like Roman, MrTasselhof, Andi and gizchina is definitely making it more likely you’ll get one of the ‘better chinese displays’
I think Roman had some association with Top Notch Tablets, they had a outlet in the UK – which is now closed I believe (they used to stock Pipo tablets, but quality was suspect).
Airyl thanks for the links. May Andi can put a thread/post in the forums regarding customs/roms that we can link too as necessary. Only thing is I have know clue about flashing custom roms (not sure how to get started) ?