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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."
It's about the Chinese cloning industry. Only a small part of the artical deals with the iPhone. What is it with the iPhone fixation?
How easily we forget things like the faulty capacitor espionage clusterfuck.
1985 Marty: What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.
1955 Doc: Unbelievable.
Korean products went through the same thing in the 1990s. Anyone remember how crappy Hyundais were when first introduced in the U.S.? Last year they topped the J.D. Power initial quality survey for non-premium brands, coming in third behind Porsche and Lexus (though apparently they weren't able to hold it in 2007). And of course Samsung and LG are now household names in the consumer electronics market. I would suspect the Brits from the 19th century experienced the same thing with American produts.
All that remains to be seen is if China follows the same path as Japan and Korea, or if it's going to be like "made in Taiwan" which has never quite become a cachet of quality, remaining more a mark of cheapness.
Circumcision is child abuse.