Judging whether a particular brand is good or not is highly subjective. Of course some brands are superior and some brands are cheap junk - and sometimes a single manufacturer (like LG or Samsung or Apple or Intel) will produce vast quantity of products covering the entire range of awesome and mediocre and garbage.
Many people must buy the most fancy phone (or computer or TV or car or whatever) gizmo available. And most of these people are already prejudiced about brand - they will strongly prefer brands they trust and automatically dismiss brands they distrust, they will not seriously compare the full gambit of current products in a purely objective fashion.
The cellphone market is saturated. While there may be a suprisingly limited number of actual cellphone device ODMs and OEMs, consumers can select from a surprisingly large number of cellphone models and brands and variants (and accessories) on market. And the reality which drives any competitive market which has become saturated with competing offerings is very simple: the products tend to price themselves and you basically get exactly what you pay for. Whether the factory plants are physically located in China (or Taiwan or wherever) is irrelevant when competing across the world market.
Apple and Samsung each sell their "premium" cellular devices for $1000 and up and up. If that's what you want and what you simply must have then that's what you'll choose to buy regardless of cost (which is incidentally exactly why they cost so much, lol, even though they are also Made in China). But outside of these few blatant pay-for-the-logo branding exceptions, you can get a working touchscreen cellphone for anywhere between $50 and $500. If you want to surf and play facebook games and have all the fastest bling then a device with better specs will be a better choice, if you want to just have a working touchscreen phone which can remember your contacts and send txt messages then a lower-cost device will serve you just as well without wasting your money.
My advice is to head over to a few cellphone stores/kiosks, talk to the salespeople, play with and compare some of the devices. Get a feel of what's available, what you like, what you dislike, what you're willing to pay for. Then feed the internet details about the cellphone brands/models/devices (or features) you like and see what sorts of other approximately comparable products google spits out.
