A look at the Chinese booths at Mobile World Congress (pictures)

Based in Shenzhen, China, Konka Mobile isn't widely distributed around the world, but if you live in India, you've probably heard of this brand.

The annual electronics expo that takes place every June in Taiwan has a presence here at MWC, but mostly to show off winners of its design awards.

This Shenzhen-based company has a small booth, but my eyes were on what appears to be a blatant rip-off of a well-known Korean smartphone.

I didn't peg Gionee to be a Chinese brand at first, but well, that problem was solved quickly enough when I started talking to the staff there. Then I learned about the pretty awesome Gionee Elife S5.5. You should check out my hands-on here.

Oppo's booth was tucked neatly behind HTC's, and I walked in circles around the exhibition hall before finding it. The company has its excellent Oppo N1 on display, and you can also read the review here.

The sudden increase in octa-core handset announcements is due to Taiwan semiconductor company MediaTek and its products offering a cheaper alternative to Qualcomm's chipsets. If your low- to midrange phone isn't running Qualcomm, it's likely to be on MediaTek's solution.

Not every company is rolling in cash, so to get to MWC, a government grant is usually needed. This results in a pavilion just for Chinese companies. You'll also find the same is true for other countries such as Korea and Japan.

At first, I walked past this booth thinking that this was a Lenovo phone booth -- Lenovo sells its handsets in China with the LePhone brand. But upon close inspection, it's actually another Shenzhen-based company that uses the Lephone branding (without the capital P). You can see many potential distributors and customers checking out this OEM's products.

Taiwanese company Askey mainly specializes in telecommunication equipment, but the company did have a rugged enterprise handset that's powered by Android on display. The TN450A1 is a dual-core device that's powered by Android 4.2 with LTE connectivity.

Coship apparently has a handset that runs an OS called 960 as well as Android. Unfortunately, the staff had no demo phone to show -- everything was running on Android -- and my attempts at asking for more information were pretty much brushed off.

Considering that the company had plastered its booths with signs about being a dual OS leader, it's pretty odd not to see any of its handsets actually having that feature. When walking past the booth again today, I noticed a picture panel of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and likely the company's founder. I shook my head and walked on.