Best of Mobile: Readers’ Choice series

The bulk of reader votes went to Xiaomi, going from last year’s 3% to 4.6% (a whopping 34% more than before) to clinch a new #4 in the rankings, up from its previous 7th place. Likely, Xiaomi’s strategy in giving Singaporean consumers more love and attention has paid off massively. But let’s not forget that the brand is well-received for some of its best works, like Xiaomi 15 Ultra and the repackaged Ultra-tier phones with its sibling brand (Poco F7 Ultra and Poco F8 Ultra).

OPPO also managed to get a gentle uptick to 5.8% and is holding steady in third place. This is a healthy sign of user confidence in the brand, especially since it has decent user support in Singapore with hard-hitting products like OPPO Find N5 and OPPO Find X9 Pro.

A special mention goes to Honor, which has gone from a dormant brand in Singapore just a few years ago to snatching up 3.4% vote share. Its return to the local market has been well-received. This is partly thanks to devices like Magic7 Pro / Magic8 Pro being slightly more affordable than their rivals, and entry-level models being readily available at our local telcos at very low cost.

Best Foldable Phone Brand – Samsung

With the foldable landscape finally hitting its stride and consumers experiencing a variety of Android brands, we now have a sense of how the form factor is perceived locally.

While it kept the crown, Samsung saw its vote share slide to 53.8% (from last year’s maiden 62%). A bulk of them went to newcomers to the Singapore market, like Huawei, bumping the Chinese brand up to 11.6% (from 7%) and snatching the #2 rank. The reasoning is quite simple: Despite having an amazing Galaxy Z Fold7 to keep its fans, the Samsung Galaxy TriFold was only announced after voting ended. In that time, Huawei managed to bring its older Mate XT equivalent to Singapore, though it arrived late and was relatively expensive. This tallies with our many conversations with keen top-level executives across a variety of phone makers, who’ve always found the Singaporean appetite for tech-forward products confusing (some outright refused to believe what they are seeing).

Well, at least we have the numbers to show for it now.

Also, the bigger, book-style foldable seems more preferred among our market’s users. Honor had no reader-submitted votes previously, but it suddenly appeared behind Google with 7%. The brand has its award-winning Magic V5 to thank for that achievement. For comparison, Xiaomi actually has the Mix Flip in Singapore with a Mix Flip 2 on the cards, so it’s not far-fetched to think that its gamble on flip phones alone has resulted in a stagnated vote share.

Best Mobile Processor Brand for Android – Qualcomm

This is the second time we’re doing a vote for our readers’ favourite mobile processor brand since Android phones have more options. Once again, Qualcomm has maintained last year’s #1 rank with a higher vote share of 43.1% (up from 39%). We also kept the “No Preference” option to ensure the sentiment is accurately represented for users who don’t give two hoots, so this is not a fluke (and it remained at 13%). Qualcomm has not stopped making great strides in its field, so we can say this achievement was well-earned.

MediaTek, despite its high-end chipsets seeing significant advancements and catching up greatly with Qualcomm’s, still has a small share of the vote. The quality difference between its entry-level and flagship-grade processors may be too big to reconcile, and we understand that not every gadget necessarily uses the best MediaTek chips available. Perhaps things can turn around once MediaTek gets a chance to equip more high-end phones beyond its current Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo customers.

Google and Samsung may not have the same value-for-money nor the most powerful or most power-efficient processors around, but they’re still greatly respected by their users since they still put out reasonably high performance without big benchmark numbers. This shows that demand for mobile processors is split relatively evenly: there are just as many who need processors good enough for mobile gaming as those who only need them for smooth day-to-day operations.

Best Tablet Brand – Apple

It’s hard to beat the optimisations on Apple’s iPad tablets, and our readers seem to think so, too. At 56% vote share in the #1 spot, and Samsung also dipping slightly to 20% to maintain its #2 position, it’s clear that the market is increasingly preferring affordable Android tablets for lightweight, personal use. The tablet market itself is small when compared to mobile phones, but that doesn’t change how bigger screens will always have a place in people’s device roster (and wallets).

That wraps up the Readers’ Choice voting segment for the Best of Mobile, but don’t forget to check out the results in these other categories that we’ll be publishing over the next few days.

Lastly, don’t forget that we’ve also published our Editor’s Choice results here to help you get the best of the best gear.