AnTuTu's December Top 10 Android handhelds unveiled

Even though ZTE was on the brink of bankruptcy due to the U.S. trade embargoes, the Chinese company managed to overcome the problems and released some of the best performing models of 2018. (Source: AnTuTu)

This does not happen too often, but December 2018 brought an all-Chinese roster for the best performing Android handhelds. ZTE's Nubia Red Magic Mars and Nubia X managed to place first and 10th, respectively. Huawei showed a solid presence with five models and proved it really is the second largest phone-maker after Samsung. Xiaomi and OnePlus got pushed to the lower half this time.

by Bogdan Solca, 2019/01/04

The top 10 best performing Android phones of December 2018 were recently announced by AnTuTu and, for the first time in a while, no Korean or Japanese models got featured. The entire roster is composed of Chinese models, with Huawei providing half of the devices on this list.

Since the Snapdragon 855 and Exynos 9820 SoCs are still not available in any commercial product, most of the top performers for December are powered by the Kirin 980 or the Snapdragon 845 chips. Surprisingly enough, even if the Kirin 980 is generally considered to be the better SoC, the fastest device sitting on top of the roster for December is the ZTE Nubia Red Magic Mars gaming phone that is powered by an overclocked Snapdragon 845 and integrates as much as 10 GB of RAM. This model obliterated all the others in the memory and GPU tests.

The next five models come from Huawei and are powered by the new Kirin 980 SoC and include the Mate 20, Honor V20, Mate 20X, Mate 20 Pro and Honor Magic 2. Two more gaming phones from Xiaomi, the Black Shark Helo and the original Black Shark, placed on the 7th and 9th positions, respectively. 8th on the list is the OnePlus 6T and, to round the list nicely, the 10th place is occupied by another ZTE device – the Nubia X, which is the first handheld with front and rear displays.