4 Chinese phone makers wait until the end of the world to launch flagship handsets!

The end of the world is just hours away but rather than worrying about what time the meteor will hit, or when the floods will begin, we can’t keep our minds off all the great quad-core phones expected to launch from the likes of Xiaomi, ZTE, Lenovo along with the new cloud phone from search giant Baidu.

While we can’t comment on whether or not tomorrow is going to be our last day on earth, what we can say is that tomorrow looks to be the first day of quad-core Chinese wars with a few brands choosing the (potentially) historic day as the time to launch their flagship models!

Of course Chinese quad-core Android phones have already been out for some time, the Meizu MX 4-core being one of the first earlier this year, then the Xiaomi M2, Meizu MX2, Oppo Find 5 not to mention Huawei’s devices, but with so many quad-core phones arriving around the same time and two coming on the same day thing’s are sure to begin hoting up!

Lenovo K860i

Lenovo are far from being the coolest kid on the block, but they seem to have checked most of the right boxes with their new K860i quad-core phone! The K860i is expected to launch with a 5-inch 720p IPS display, 1.6Ghz quad-core Exynos CPU, 2GB RAM and 16GB of on board storage.

Unlike other manufacturers, Lenovo have gone for a 8 mega-pixel rear camera on the K860i rather than the 12 and 13 mega-pixel unit found on competitors machines, but they have decided to go for Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean as the standard install.

Other features include a 2250mAh battery and support WCDMA plus GSM. Expected price for the Lenovo K860i is thought to be around 2388 Yuan ($383) which looks to be pretty good value to us.

ZTE Nubia Z5

While Lenovo want to make a splash with the K860i, all eye are really trained on ZTE’s new Nubia brand which will officially launch it’s flagship phone tomorrow.

Like the Lenovo K860i the Nubia Z5 is expected to be a 5-inch device with quad-core CPU and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, but that’s where all similarities end! Rumours suggest that the Z5 will feature a 1920 x 1080 HD display, a Qualcomm S4 Pro quad-core CPU and the rear camera will be a 13 mega-pixel unit!

There will also me 2GB RAM, Jelly Bean (as mentioned above) and a whopping 3000mAh battery! Pricing is thought to be between 2500-3000 Yuan ($400 – $480) which is a little less than the Oppo Find 5’s $499 price tag.

Xiaomi M2 China Mobile edition

Not exactly new, but the arrival of the China Mobile version of the Xiaomi M2 is on the way with the first sales expected to begin tomorrow along with Xiaomi’s new Sina Weibo method of purchasing the current M2.

I only just managed to have a try of the fantastic M2 this week when I (stupidly) turned down the chance to buy it! What I can say from my very brief time with the phone is that it has one of the best rear camera’s I’ve seen of any 8 mega-pixel phone to date, and the screen is absolutely stunning!

I won’t go over the full specification details of the M2 as we have a very lengthy post here with all the details. This version of the M2 will be exactly the same as the current model, but tweaked to run on China Mobiles network.

Prices should follow the Unicom model with the 16GB version costing 1999 Yuan ($320) and the 32GB model costing around 2300 Yuan ($370) although there will likely be China Mobile bundles available too!

Baidu Cloudphone

Tomorrow is also going to be the date that Chinese search giant Baidu launches its own cloudphone complete with Baidu optimised version of Android. As you would expect, many (all?) of Google’s services and the Playstore will have been stripped from the Baidu phone and replaced with their own services for media, social, maps and E-commerce.

unfortunately not a quad-core phone like the others, the Baidu will run a dual-core MT6577 CPU with 1GB RAM, 4.5-inch display and just 5 mega-pixel rear camera.

As you would expect this is the cheapest phone of tomorrows line up and will go on sale for 999 Yuan ($160), which isn’t bad for such a big brand phone!

We’ll keep our eye’s peeled during tomorrows launch events and bring you the best news as and