CHiQ and Changhong: what they ship with and what comes off

CHiQ is one of the brands that has grown fastest on price in European shops, and almost nobody has looked at what sits behind it. Behind it is Changhong, which says so plainly on its own UK site: "CHiQ is a new generation of high-end smart home appliances brand of Changhong".

We downloaded what the brand publishes, what it declares in the European product register and what Google Play's device directory says. The three sources do not tell the same story.

First things first: the European website is for sale#

chiq.eu responds, but what it serves is a Nameshift page offering the domain for sale. chiq.de does the same through ELITEDOMAINS, with the price on show: 4,999 euros excluding VAT.

The brand's real site is chiq.com, with a version per country (es.chiq.com, de.chiq.com, fr.chiq.com, it.chiq.com, cz.chiq.com). And changhong.co.uk, which you would expect to be the British site for the televisions, only sells laser projectors and projection screens: it explains there that it set up its distribution in Dundee, Scotland, in the last quarter of 2019, and there is not a single television on it.

For a brand that already sponsors Borussia Dortmund, having the European domain of its own name up for sale is a striking decision.

Who answers for the warranty#

Here there is a clear answer, and it is the same in two different places.

In EPREL, the European energy label register, the CHiQ records are filed under Changhong Europe Electric s.r.o., at Dělnická 213/12, Holešovice, 170 00 Prague 7, Czech Republic, with the address [email protected].

On the MediaMarkt Spain listings, the general product safety block gives the same Prague address and the address [email protected]. The legal name, though, wobbles: three listings say "Changhong Europe s.r.o" and two simply say "Changhong". And the country field, with that same Prague address in front of it, says "Czechia" on three listings and "China" on two. That is a data error rather than a fact: the address is Czech on all five.

A curiosity: the Changhong trademark on its own, searched in EPREL, returns fifteen records and not one of them is filed by the group. Nine were registered by RECO SPA, five by ENIF PEGASUS S.R.L. and one by JXGO SARL. The televisions with "Changhong" written on the front are declared in Europe by a distributor, not by the manufacturer.

What EPREL declares about CHiQ#

Searching for CHIQ says there are 104 records. The interface always returns the same block of twenty-five, whichever page you ask for, so we downloaded 25 out of 104 and will not extrapolate the rest.

Across those twenty-five, three figures repeat without a single exception: two years of minimum warranty, seven years of support and eight years of software update availability. These are commitments declared by the supplier, not marketing promises, and they are better than you would expect in this range.

With one wrinkle: the Amazon listing for the U43QST advertises "Product warranty: three years from the manufacturer". Two in the official register, three in the shop.

Which system each model runs#

There is no single answer here, and it is worth knowing before you buy.

Google TV across the current range. MediaMarkt Spain declares it on the L32QST, the L43QST and the L32FT, and on the M55QN9G it also spells out the base: "Google TV based on Android 14". The CHiQ sites declare it on the U43QM9G, the L32FM9E, the U43QM8G, the U50QM9V, the U43QM9V and the U98F8TG PRO.

Android TV on the older models. The Amazon listing for the L32G7L says "TV with Android 11", and in the details table the operating system is "Android" and the manufacturer is Changhong.

Nothing at all. The 40D210M declares no system anywhere: what it advertises is hotel mode, a triple tuner and a CI+ slot. It is a screen, not a smart device.

The difference matters because it changes the name of the launcher. com.google.android.leanbacklauncher is the old Android TV interface, with its row of apps; com.google.android.tvlauncher is the Google TV one, with rows of recommendations. Settings → System → About (Google TV) or Settings → Device Preferences → About (Android TV) tells you which one you have.

The memory, which it barely publishes#

In this range, what decides how many years a television lasts is not the panel: it is the memory. Once storage fills up, apps stop updating and eventually the set cannot even apply its own system update.

CHiQ publishes it for one model only, and only on the Czech site: the U98F8TG PRO, the 98-inch flagship, declares "3 GB RAM + 32 GB ROM". On the Spanish, German, French and Italian pages neither the RAM nor the storage of any television appears.

What exists outside the official site is two stray shop figures: the Amazon listing for the L32G7L puts 8 GB in the storage field, and the one for the U43QST puts 2 GB in that same field. They are shop fields filled in by somebody, and they do not even agree on what they measure.

The contrast is direct. Among the Spanish budget brands, 1.5 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage is the floor, and TD Systems and Nevir publish it model by model. CHiQ, with a much larger catalogue, publishes it for one.

Check it yourself, which is the upside of Android#

If your unit runs Android TV or Google TV, you do not depend on any listing. With ADB connected:

df -h /data tells you how much storage there is and how much is free.

cat /proc/meminfo | head -1 tells you the total memory.

If you have less than two gigabytes free, the cleanup this site describes stops being optional.

Who it shares a platform with#

In the official Google Play device list, CHiQ has seven platforms: alimos, bridgeport, dangni, dundas, hakata, longshan and osaka. Four of them are enormous neighbourhoods: alimos and dangni with 60 brands each, osaka with 54 and longshan with 52.

And two are exclusively its own: dundas and hakata. Nobody else appears in them. That is unusual for a price brand, because every CHiQ entry carries the model name AI PONT, which is a shared reference design designation: 109 brands in the directory use it. Of those 109, only five have any exclusive platform at all, and CHiQ is one of them (the others are JVC, Strong, Haier and BenQ). Strong's are not even televisions: BKK and CXR are its two HDMI sticks.

The directory does not say which commercial models these are, mind. Every CHiQ entry is called "AI PONT" and its marketing name is "Smart TV". Which of the televisions in the shop is a dundas and which is a hakata is not clarified by any public source, and we are not going to guess.

Changhong has four entries: dangni, ikebukuro, longshan and sindorim. None exclusive. It shares dangni and longshan with CHiQ, and in ikebukuro and sindorim it sits alongside Aiwa, Hyundai, JVC, Philco and Riviera, the same names as ever from the own-brand range.

What it ships with and what comes off#

Google's part. The launcher, the recommendation engine (com.google.android.tvrecommendations), voice search (com.google.android.katniss) and the services (com.google.android.gms).

Third parties. Netflix, Prime Video and the rest, by commercial agreement. Off with the ones you do not use: on a television whose memory you cannot know until you look, each one is space you may need.

Carefully, the recommendation engine: it leaves the home screen clean, but it also empties the "continue watching" row.

Leave alone: Google Play services, the launcher while you have no other one working, and anything starting with com.android. that you cannot identify.

All of this is reversible: disabled packages come back with one command, and a factory reset returns the set to how it left the box.

If you have one#

From this brand we need almost everything: the output of df -h /data, the app list and exactly what your set says under About. With a few answers we could say how much memory each range carries, which is precisely what the manufacturer does not publish today.