vstolpner
500+ Head-Fier
True. Problem with ordering in Alibaba is the shipping costs. Remember this is a wholesale portal and those vendors are used to sell a good amount of units per transaction. Rarely, shipping costs are free or inexpensive when you're ordering just 1 unit. It's not like you can add something to the cart, check it out and have free or 1 US$ shipping costs.
In addition, I'd see advisable to let them go through the retail shops and check some reviews before. My point here is that is not probably a good idea to buy the Sabbat E12 now. Better wait till the ones with the Qualcomm chipset are out on the street. Looking at the wholesale price of the new vs the older, I think that the retail price will be roughly the same.
What I'm clear now is that I wouldn't buy any chi-fi TWS that does not not come with one of the Qualcomm chipsets (qcc3020 or 3026). We're starting to see some models bringing them at affordable prices (WaveFun X-Pods 3/YTOM T1 being likely the most affordable today, with other such as the Syllable, Edifier TWS1 and the like) and we can expect this trend is going to keep on within the next months. AptX support, separate bud connectivity, lower energy consumption and therefore longer overall battery life and better call quality (cVc 8.0) are goodies one don´t want to pass.
Of course, for SQ there are many other factors that matter such as overall design, driver build quality, shell design to account for optimal resonance and some others, but I'd say the qcc's always add up to the final product.
Just keep in mind that most all the cheap Chi-fi brands dont invest in their own R&D and are essentially assemblers of components engineered and improved by individual component makers or just plain OEMs where they only stamp their brand and "market" finished white-label products made by others. That means that the ones actually driving the real innovation on the TWS are the component manufacturers.
Totally agree with what your saying.
I'm terms of shipping costs - I think they're usually pretty reasonable within China, so you just need to use a service that receives your orders and bulk ships then to you. I've seen a few around but haven't used them to know of any specific