Everyone knows about Apple, but how many people have ever heard of RAmos? The latter, a digital product manufacturer with 200 employees and a head office in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province (southeast China), generated a cash flow of 450 million yuan ($65.8 million) in 2009. Compare that with the U.S. electronics giant, whose cash flow amounted to $5.8 billion in the first quarter of 2010 and who employs more than 36,000 people, and suddenly RAmos looks like an ant sitting next to an elephant.

But in the world of consumer electronics, does the elephant always come out on top? A close look at the performance of RAmos throws up some surprising results.

Attention grabbers

In 2009, RAmos surpassed Apple to reach top place on the list of mp3/mp4 brands that most attracted the interest from Chinese users (see chart).

According to data released by Zhongguancun Online (ZOL), one of the most influential IT information and business portals in China, RAmos won 16.4 percent of votes to become the mp4 brand which attracted most attention online in China in 2009, followed by Newsmy (12.6 percent), Apple (12.4 percent), Oppo (7.9 percent), Aigo (7.7 percent), Samsung (4 percent) , Onda (4 percent), Teclast (3.8 percent), Sony (3.3 percent) and Iriver (2.7 percent).

Ren Weiwei, a consumer electronics (CE) market analyst working for ZOL, said the statistics were based on the analysis of online browsing by users from China's 79 mainstream network media and 85 sub-stations of ZOL throughout the nation. The analysis calculates the rate of clicks on online pages within a given period for products of various brands. So the method reflects the popularity of a particular product or brand among the site's users (although it does not represent sales figures).

Han Qin, an expert on mp4 product assessment and testing at ZOL, believes that the functional performance of Chinese products, particularly regarding their decoding capabilities for 720P, 1080P or 1280P HD video, is "unrivalled by foreign products."

At present, an iPod Touch 8GB model with a 3.5-inch screen, Apple's star mp4 product, sells at 1,500-2,000 yuan ($220-293) in China, and it only works with H.264 and MPEG-4 video format.

However, a Chinese-made product with the same internal memory capacity only costs 300-700 yuan ($44-102). Moreover, this product will probably have a 4.3-inch screen, much more appealing to consumers. And, it will support multiple video formats, including H.264 (BP/MP/HP), MPEG2, MPEG4/Xvid, VC-1, WMV9, MPEG1, H.263, and Divx as well as almost all mainstream file formats like TS, AVI, MKV, VOB, WMV, ASF, PMP, RM, RMVB, MOV and FLV.

Han Qin emphasized that, compared with the traditional big-name brands from overseas, China's domestic mp4 products are winning praise for their performance in the key areas of user-operation, high-definition video support and easy-portability.