Chinese white goods and TV maker Hisense are taking a few lessons from their phone making rivals and have released the companies first quad-core phone, the Hisense U958, but don’t get too excited as it’s a bit of a sheep in wolves clothing!
The feature which is really going to draw buyers in to the Hisense U958 is the 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 processor. This could have been a great base for a great phone! Unfortunately the rest of the specification is super low end!
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Starting at the display Hisense have opted for a good size 4.5-inch unit, but the resolution is a terribly low 854×480, things don’t get much better in the camera department as the main unit a 5 mega-pixel sensor. But the part of the phone which really has us wonder what Hisense were up to is the tiny amount of RAM! Just 512MB!
There are a few highlights such as dual-sim support, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and the obvious low price, but we can’t help but think if Hisense were serious about entering the low-cost phone market they would have been better making an MTK phone with slightly higher spec and similar retail price!
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To be fair, at 1.2GHz it is likely to be a S4 Play SoC, not the S4 Pro found in high end smartphones. The S4 Play is contains either Cortex A5 or A7 cores so it competes with MTK chips and is priced accordingly. In fact if it is the Cortex A5 variety it probably performs worse than the dual core Cortex A9 MT65X7. Once the budget quad core SoCs hit volume we will see many more budget quad core phones with similar specs.
I’m having a hard time digesting a quadcore using only A-7, but A-5? kill it with fire!
Yeah the Qualcomm MSM8225Q is a completely pointless part that’s for sure. A waste of silicon!