Last Month: 10 Hottest Stories in October

We review last month’s stories and pick the top ones that made the biggest impact to our readers. We track these stories by the number of shares, retweets and total traffic. The month of October are mostly all about phones.

Last month’s top stories was dominated by ZTE with their botched up sale and the rest are mostly about smartphones.

ZTE Grand X2 L Sale. ZTE made a lot of noise when it announced a super-sale of the ZTE Grand X2 L, dropping the price to just Php1,999USD 34INR 2,888EUR 32CNY 248 from over Php11,000USD 187INR 15,891EUR 179CNY 1,365. While the smartphone has been around since 2013, the price drop got a lot of people lining up as ZTE says they have enough stocks. Over 45,000 views on that announcement alone.

Complete List of Smartphones Getting Android 5.0 Lollipop. With the formal announcement of Android 5.0, smartphone users are now eager to have their devices updated to Lollipop. Here’s our updated list so far.

Top 10 Smartphones Above Php15,000USD 256INR 21,669EUR 243CNY 1,862. As prices of flagship smartphones start to drop, Filipinos are becoming more and more price-sensitive. We published a round-up of potentially good handsets in the Php15k and above range here.

Top Smartphones under Php10,000USD 170INR 14,446EUR 162CNY 1,241. If budget is a concern, then we also published a separate article on how much your Php10,000USD 170INR 14,446EUR 162CNY 1,241 can go. The list we posted here in actually pretty interesting.

Chaos ensues over ZTE Sale. It wasn’t a surprise when we got reports form many customers and readers that the ZTE sale went awry. Lack of organization, manpower and low inventory were the main culprits. What is puzzling is that the distributor, MSI-ECS, has been known to do huge but well-organized warehouse sale every year. They sent out an apology later but the fiasco was already all over the news.

Memory Matters: All the Smartphones with 2GB of RAM. With quad-core processors and octa-cores becoming the norm for most smartphones, the focus of consumers has shifted to internal memory. As per request by our readers, we published the affordable smartphones with 2GB of RAM here.

Smartphones Under Php5,000USD 85INR 7,223EUR 81CNY 621. This price category used to be the territory of feature phones. Now Android and Windows Phones have invaded their competitive segment in the battle for bigger marketshare.

LTE Smartphones under Php10,000USD 170INR 14,446EUR 162CNY 1,241. Despite the erratic signal and limited LTE coverage, LTE remains to be one of the biggest factors consumers consider when purchasing a smartphone.

OpenSignal Compares LTE of Globe and Smart. That perpetual question on who has the fastest LTE network is supposedly answered in this report by OpenSignal. We still question the methodology and parameters but, aside from Ookla and Akamai, OpenSignal seems to be one of the very few who has a large-enough data set to make the intelligent guesstimate.

No New iPods. Our hopes of a new iPod have been crushed in the latest announcement of Apple. No new iPod Touch, no Nano and they even removed the iPod Classic. What is surprising is that Apple’s response to slow sales is phasing out an iconic product instead of innovating it. Have they totally given up on the iPod? According to Tim Cook, they no longer have the parts.