Chinese Pirates Copy iPhone, Make Improvements

An anonymous reader writes "Popular Science notes that manufacturers in China duplicate many well-know products. This includes the Apple iPhone, imitations of which are rolling off the assembly line already. That might actually be a good thing for some users, who might enjoy the user experience of China's own miniOne. 'It ran popular mobile software that the iPhone wouldn't. It worked with nearly every worldwide cellphone carrier, not just AT&T, and not only in the U.S. It promised to cost half as much as the iPhone and be available to 10 times as many consumers.' The cloned iPhone uses a Linux-based system. 'The cloners hire a team of between 20 and 40 engineers to begin decoding the circuit boards. At the same time, coders start to develop an operating system for the phone with a similar feature set. (The typical cloner either uses off-the-shelf code, writes something entirely new, or modifies a publicly available Linux-based system.)' Using the iPhone as an example, the PopSci site walks through the process of making imitation technology."

Comments

I'm down with that.

[torpor]

Open Source is an adequate response to the Cloner problem. If we can all make it, because its designed to be make-able by all in the first place, then there is no worries with the economy issue.

At this point, the question becomes: how fast can we all shift to an open/cloner form of economy, with local resources and local markets being properly managed in competition with the way they manage things in China? Answer that one, or at least have some sort of scope for the horizon, and maybe things will just get better and better for those of us who want nice, fast, cheap, easily reproducible hardware, for interesting uses ..

Patent, schmatent -- supply and demand wins

[dada21]

My #1 reason I am against the idea of patents and intellectual property is because it is proven time and again that the market of demand and supply is the most justified market in terms of what is good for consumers and producers.

I am inspired repeatedly by what I see in China. We are going this Christmas again, to be wowed by the explosion caused by freedom and true capitalism (uncluttered by regulations and taxes). I am happy to call myself a Pirate, one who has no care for copyright, patents or trademarks. They're useless old mercantilistic protections for corporate-State entities that wish to monopolize something for a long period of time.

Individuals who invent do so because something else inspired them. If that inspiration was a product that was lacking features, then they showed the original inventor the shortcomings of their invention. If someone releases a product cheaper or with more features than your product, you must move forward to beat them. Competition drives innovation, not monopoly IP protection. So what if you spent 5 years designing something new? Just having an original product doesn't guarantee success -- you need finances, marketing, customer support and repair facilities. It is a combination of all these things that will bring you success, with the R&D stage merely a blip. Who comes up with an idea first may be lacking all the other needs for a profitable product.

For my own creations, I designed moralIP which is my view on how to morally protect designs. I never copyright or patent my writings or inventions -- and even if others steal them, my market base grows with new people interested in what I have to say, or what I've invented. That's the unseen hand of the market at work, and I love every minute of it.

Re:Patent, schmatent -- supply and demand wins

[dada21]

Not to mention the "uncluttered by regulations" part tends to result in highly unsafe products. The list goes on. Somehow, I don't equate "being able to make random knockoffs but cannot do anything without governments approval" to be "true capitalism"

The safety of products sold is a prime reason to use a retailer and not buy wholesale yourself. Will Amazon or CVS or Wal-Mart sell unsafe products? They add their profit overhead to cover their infrastructure, but also to insure against buying faulty or dangerous products. If a product is deemed dangerous, they'll remove it from the market. If they find a large number of dangerous products from a given source, say China, they may go so far as to test products themselves before releasing them to the market. A large retailer can do way more, way faster, than the FDA, USDA or other organizations can. See: Underwriters Laboratories.

As for regulations, China is definitely not a regulated economy as much as the US is. China's provinces ("States") have varying degrees of regulations, with the least regulated ones growing the fastest. Doug Casey says about Shanghai "The dozens of hotels that can compete with those in Bangkok are starting to draw not just businessmen, but tourists. They like the beaches, and the shopping in a tax and regulation-free environment is incredible."

I've visitd Beijing and Shanghai, and I can tell you that government is quickly backing off of entrepreneurs and the business market. The booms in growth are amazing, along with the freedom that even a non-citizen has in starting new businesses. The same can be said about Dubai, where I'd love to at least have residency because of the unlimited opportunity to grow and blossom a business.

Re:Patent, schmatent -- supply and demand wins

[kamapuaa]

Well China is about as close to your utopian IP-free state as possible.

It's basically decimated the local film industry - China should be a huge market, but basically it's ignored even by local filmmakers, who aim themselves at foreign audiences - hence all those lame Westernish Kung-Fu movies from Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. This is also true in Hong Kong, which has a history of excellence and two of the greatest directors in the world, Wong Kar Wai and Johnny To, who now rely on non-Chinese audiences or even have turned to making American movies.

Chinese manufacturers have to aim at the foreign market from day 1. Any successful product will be immediately copied by Chinese cut-rate manufacturers. It is economically infeasible to design a product for the Chinese market.

Imitations also are often of a much lower quality. Bootleg bottled water in Beijing was recently revealed to often be fake, using filtered Beijing tap water (you wouldn't want to drink it).

Local musicians aren't able to sell their CDs. Anything popular from local bands will be sold on the street for maybe fifty cents. There is basically no music scene in China, everything is bootlegged from Hong Kong or Taiwan or the US.

Goods in China are marginally cheaper, but it's at the expense of shoddy products that are often of a lower quality, and of a moribund IP development, and a lack of locally produced culture. There is no motivation to doing work or putting expense into research, if there's no economic reward - and there's no economic reward when your ideas are ripped off immediately.

I'd love to see all these people who are so opposed to IP restrictions actually consider their argument, rather than use it as their rationalization for why it's not stealing to download bootleg copies of "Transformers the Movie."

Re:Patent, schmatent -- supply and demand wins

[jellomizer]

We are going this Christmas again, to be wowed by the explosion caused by freedom and true capitalism (uncluttered by regulations and taxes).

uncluttered by regulation and taxes?????? Your kidding right... You may not have a tax listed as part of the price but because most companies are owned by the government the government gets its cuts. Regulations yea right just recently a higher up governemtn offical was executed by the chinese government because of his corruption he lead to poisoned food to be exported. If it was internal they may not have cared. The regulations were and are on the book it is just that the government is so inept that it barely inforces them in fear of a public revolt.

A few months Ago NPR was doing a report on Chinese Capitalism and interviewed an buisness owner he said the only thing the comunist government is there for is to add red tape to the process.

Re:Patent, schmatent -- supply and demand wins

[steelfood]

Oh where to begin...

It's basically decimated the local film industry - China should be a huge market, but basically it's ignored even by local filmmakers, who aim themselves at foreign audiences - hence all those lame Westernish Kung-Fu movies from Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. This is also true in Hong Kong, which has a history of excellence and two of the greatest directors in the world, Wong Kar Wai and Johnny To, who now rely on non-Chinese audiences or even have turned to making American movies. ...
Local musicians aren't able to sell their CDs. Anything popular from local bands will be sold on the street for maybe fifty cents. There is basically no music scene in China, everything is bootlegged from Hong Kong or Taiwan or the US.

Wrong. Entertainment is a luxury. It's a luxury very few people in mainland China can afford. Most people are too busy trying to make a living to spend money on entertainment like music or movies. Thus, the market for such things is nowhere near as large as you're imagining. The pirate market isn't targetted at Chinese people in China. They're targetting people who can afford these luxuries, namely, Chinese people in the west.

That's why big-budgeted movies are aimed at a primarily western audience. But that isn't true either. There is a thriving entertainment industry in Hong Kong with music and movies for Chinese audiences, despite the rampant piracy from the mainland. The directors and actors you mentioned are the ones trying to break into a larger audience, not because they can't make money off of the Chinese audience (plenty of others do), but because the western market is so much bigger. Comparing the 10-15 million people in HK and overseas with the 200 million people in the US alone and you can see the difference in market size, no mention of the rest of the western world. And because they can make movies western audiences can watch without getting completely lost in the cultural references, they will try for that market.

Chinese manufacturers have to aim at the foreign market from day 1. Any successful product will be immediately copied by Chinese cut-rate manufacturers. It is economically infeasible to design a product for the Chinese market.

Wrong again. There are plenty of chinese manufacturers designing for the Chinese market. You might have even heard of some of them, as some of these brands have made it to the US. Many of these brands began in China selling to a primarily Chinese market. Many of these brands were once available outside of China only through the gray market. More recently, these smaller brands have been selling to an international customer base over the internet.

Imitations also are often of a much lower quality. Bootleg bottled water in Beijing was recently revealed to often be fake, using filtered Beijing tap water (you wouldn't want to drink it).

Dasani in Great Britain was recently found to be just filtered water from the Thames. Most bottled waters are just filtered tap water, if that much. If you've got some romantic notion that bottled water actually comes from a glacier or some natural spring, then I've got a bridge to sell you.

Goods in China are marginally cheaper, but it's at the expense of shoddy products that are often of a lower quality, and of a moribund IP development, and a lack of locally produced culture. There is no motivation to doing work or putting expense into research, if there's no economic reward - and there's no economic reward when your ideas are ripped off immediately.

Ok, there are three major points to address here. First, it is true that knockoff goods in China are much cheaper, and the quality of the material may be lower than the real thing, but the manufacturing process is the same, since everything is made in China anyway. For some things, there is no difference in material, so there's no difference in quality between the Chinese knockoff and the real thing.

Second, there's 5 thousand

Anyone bother to look at the video on last page?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone commenting on this even bothered to look at the video of the product on the last page?

To suggest that this product is "better" than the iPhone is ridiculous.

It just looks like a roughly-made copy of the iPhone design running linux.
The interface is crummy and hardly a copy of the iPhone beyond the background graphic and a copy of copied icons.
No multi-touch, inconsistent interface, really looks like something thrown together.

US can't legally buy pirated products

[MSTCrow5429]

Will anyone in the US be able to legally purchase and use a miniOne? Obviously people can and do buy large amounts of fake Louis Vuitton handbags, but you don't need to subscribe to a third-party to make use of the handbag. US cell phone companies will have to recognize and allow the miniOne into their cellular networks. Won't Apple lawyers have something to say about this? I'm not at all certain the miniOne would pass legal scrutiny.

Re:China: cleverer and more numerous

[pzs]

I met a graphic designer on a train a few months ago who said that Indian design companies were using European designers to get there processes in place. They would invite these people over on favourable contracts and find out everything about how a design company should be run. The deals were often not as favourable as the designers first thought, but by the time they'd left their host company had already learned an awful lot from them.

This woman was a bit paranoid and anti-foreign but it did have a hint of plausibility about it.

I guess it's all a continuous cycle. I wonder whether within my lifetime, the US will go from world dominance to scratching around for a world role. It only took about 40 years for the British Empire to go from "sun never setting" to "small island in Northern Europe".

Peter

Never underestimate...

[bigattichouse]

Never underestimate the power of infinite cheap labor. My Dad was navigator for a squadron of Recon F-4s (RF-4s - sheep in wolf's clothing) that flew night missions in vietnam. Their job (occasionally) was to take pictures at night of the Ho Chi Mihn trail. The fighter/bombers would bomb the road during the day. The VC would literally drive trucks down the bombed-out road at night. They would have a crew with shovels in front and behind. One crew filled in the craters, the truck would driver over, one crew dug out the craters. If you flew over the next day, the road still looked "bombed out". Infinite cheap or free labor is a powerful thing.

piracy?

[m2943]

The iPhone is basically a box with a big touch screen. The iPhone design has so few distinguishing features that it's hard to see which parts of the design Apple could claim a trademark on. Furthermore, Apple wasn't even the first to ship such a phone, LG was.

"Piracy" means violating either copyrights or trademarks. So, if they put an Apple logo or some unique graphical design on the phone, that would be piracy. If they copied Apple code, that would be piracy. It seems unlikely that they did either.

They might run into some patents, but patent infringement isn't usually referred to as piracy. Furthermore, the only really novel functionality on the iPhone is multitouch (technology Apple didn't invent but bought), and I seriously doubt the clones even bothered with multitouch.

So, this kind of cloning is probably not piracy. And given the many limitations of the iPhone, this kind of cloning is a good thing for the consumer. Even if they were the same price, I'd want one of these Chinese phones because it sounds like a better phone to me.

iClone likely has cut & paste, unlike iPhone

[Weezul]

I'm not sure what "badly integrated" means. Isn't the iPhone inherently "badly integrated" with itself because it lacks cut & paste? No cut & paste means the iPhone doesn't even qualify as a "smartphone" or "feature phone", period. Guess what feature one'll find on the Chinese iClone? lol

Re:Cool!

[djasbestos]

Now, how does selling a counterfeit under someone else's name fit in to your view of capitalism?
Pure, unfettered greed from pure, unfettered competition. I guess all those laissez-faire capitalists forgot about China, huh? Doesn't work so well without the Man there to *gasp* regulate business!!! "But that's SOCIALISM!!" Oh noes!

Just because the quality *might* be shit won't stop people from buying cheaper a knock-off. Unregulated competition is the definition of pure capitalism as any Milton-loving Libertarian or Republican (Mitt Romney?) would tell you. Can't have your cake and eat it too, I suppose is the moral.

GP is right.

Re:Apple logo too, sorry

[magarity]

it had apple logos and names all over it! More and bigger than the real iPod
 
I found this the funniest thing when travelling in China; everyone is so 'new money' and totally insecure about having brand name stuff that all the logos are at least 4x the size as on the same US product. You never forget the first time you see a 4 inch long Alligator logo or the 3 inch tall Polo player on a guy's shirt...

US Knockoff Competition

[Doc Ruby]

If the US government were really interested in a competitive economy rather than merely protecting incumbent crony corporations, this Chinese competition would face even stiffer competition from American corporations knocking off stuff, too.

We could tell that the US government was interested in that competition, and not propping up incumbents with IP protectionism that only cripples American (and close economic allies like Western Europe and Japan) competition's chance to compete, if the IP controls like flimsy but unending patents and copyrights were discarded in favor of growth.

Not only would American competitors to these Chinese knockoffs benefit, but of course the consumers would benefit from the lower prices and innovations. Since consumers are most of the economy, along with the labor we sell to corporations, our economy would benefit.

Or, we can just let China eat our lunch, while we prohibit ourselves from fighting back.

Not the same thing

[WindBourne]

Japan was NOT ripping off. They had low costs cars that Americans were buying, but they were not rip offs. They then focused on quality. Personally, I admire the country for what they did. They pulled themselves up by their boot straps.

China is a WHOLE different matter. They are flat out stealing. But that is by design. The chinese gov pushes this and as long as American and European countries allow this, it will get worse. You are correct about complacency, but the real issue is Americans (and EUers) who accept this cheap junk. Want to stop it? Quit buying it. As of a month ago, I quit buying Fischer-price because they do not check their toys (I have a 3.5 y.o. and a 10 m.o.). For the last couple of years, I refused to buy any fish from china. I know that most of it comes from American waters, but the problem is there quality is very low.

And these days, we have to worry about espionage. On a project that I was working on, we had a "Taiwain" native who wanted to invest into the company. Most importantly, he wanted control of some hardware that we had, and wanted to sell it to mainland china. Since it was under gov. control, there was NO way to allow this. And yet, he was still looking at ways to take it to china. Another individual applied for a job with us, and her resume looked interesting until I saw that she was chinese citizenship. With that, we could not hire her. Once I explained that we were developing equipment for the DOD, NSA, and CIA and could not hire her, I started getting phone calls and emails every day. Needless to say, not a chance.

Two-way street

[supercrisp]

I study literature, and at least in that realm copying was a two-way street. Dickens lost gobs of money to American editions of his work while Melville, Clemens, and others lost gobs to copying in England. There were no copyright agreements, so there was flagrant copying. In fact, our nations were at war with one another off and on during the nineteenth century. It might be best to not cry over spilt milk.

Re:Two-way street

[laddiebuck]

He was referring to industrial espionage, not literature. Where do you think turn-of-the-century American cars got their technology from (later to outsell British and German models in those countries)?

Re:Cool!

[OldeTimeGeek]

No, the iPod was about "here's something that's easier to use". Do you really think that they have sold so many just based upon the fact that it's made by Apple? If so, why didn't it work in the same way for the Newton, the Lisa and just about any other item in their product lines? Would it have sold so well if it cost 30% less but had an interface that totally sucked? You may not like it, but there are millions of people who do.

Besides, if there were nothing new nor interesting about the iPhone, why would the Chinese company worked so hard to make an almost exact copy of it?

Re:Clones aren't clones, just cheap rippoffs

[GooberToo]

Most Americans seem to think paying more means higher quality. Most don't seem to understand that's not how the world works. It happens all the time where a superior, less expensive product fails because because they were simply out marketed. Heck, I've even seen situations where potential customer's would even look at the product because it was significantly less expensive than the compentition. The solution was to double the price, reword the "sale brochures", and the customer bought...the exact same product as what was half as expensive the day before.

Case in point, look at Microsoft. They have buggy, crappy products for the most part, but they prevail because what they lack as a technology company they more than compensate as a Marketing company with ruthless business tactics. MS is not king because they are a technology giant. Microsoft is not king because they are a quality giant.

The lession learned is American consumers as a whole are dumber than dirt.

Re:I remember when it used to be Japan

[0100010001010011]

Doc: No wonder this circuit failed. It says "Made in Japan".
Marty McFly: What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.
Doc: Unbelievable.

Re:Brilliant!

[Sparr0]

If you, as an American coder, are having your code license infringed upon by a Chinese company that you can't touch, I wonder if you could go after stores selling the device. They, too, are violating the law. You could probably get ahold of their inventory, if nothing else.

Re:Cool!

[spun]

That is the logical consequence of my beliefs, and why I believe in democratic control of the means of production. You make the claim that the ability of anyone, anywhere in the world to buy access to the means of production will never be limited in a true free market. If I saw this were the case, I would have no problem with private ownership.

What I see is that the free market has failure modes which create a similar problem to the concentration of power in a governmental system. You have runaway feedback loops where those with money have more power to influence the market, tilting the playing field towards them and gaining more money with which to tilt the playing field even further. This leads to concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. Eventually, people will be born who do not have the means to buy control of their own means of production. Those people will be virtual slaves to those who do own the means of production.

I ask you, what in your system would keep this from happening?

Re:Cool!

[nightgeometry]

Must be a different Cuba from the one I travelled round, the one I took a stack of books to (you can't take DVD players there though, weirdly - and that can mean problems with laptops, but if the drive can be removed, not a problem).

Discussing politics with the people there didn't seem to be a problem either - some didn't like Castro, some did, some didn't like how a small number of families were getting wealthy, and recreating the class system, some didn't see it as a huge issue. Kinda like people everywhere.

Didn't really eat much rice and the place is a nightmare for vegetarians though :(

Best thing about Cuba though - you see hardly any Americans - that has to make it about the best destination in the world...

Bad Business Decision

[PPH]

Apple may rue the day they decided to delay the iPhone in markets other then the USA. By the time they make it th Europe and Asia, those markets might already be saturated.

supply and demand sucks when you can't withhold

[crovira]

labor and demand a higher salary.

But that is China's situation and is rapidly becoming the case in the west.

Re:Cool!

[AndersOSU]

Here's an interesting thought. Marx made extensive use of Kantian dialectics, in which you have the thesis battling the antithesis until the synthesis arose.

I've always wondered if Marx really thought that communism was the synthesis to the decadence of the bourgeoisie and the plight of the proletariat, or really recognized that it was a antithesis to capitalism and was merely promoting it to spur the development of a more amenable synthesis.

Re:Cool!

[Serengeti]

But it's not CEO's that 'commit' anything. Sadly, while sharks they are, they are hired because of what they do well. It's up to the company owners/founders to be responsible about their actions regarding environmental waste concerns. And if we talk about publically traded companies... well, thats you and me, and whomever owns stock in these companies. After all, if you owned stock in Microsoft, would you vote for them to stop monopolistic practices? What would happen to the value of your stocks?

It's not companies we should blame, it's the stock market society that we've built. It's you and me.