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What You Get When You Buy a $40 iPhone In a Bar
Barence writes "How good — or bad — are fake iPhones? PC Pro blogger Steve Cassidy has a friend who paid £25 ($40) for an 'iPhone' in a bar, and he's got the photos and full lowdown of what's inside this not-so smartphone. The phone looks convincing enough from the outside, with a genuine-looking backplate, but things start to go wrong when you switch it on. What's a "Java" and "WLAN" App button doing on the screen? And how about that Internet Explorer icon? It's like you're handling an artefact from an alternate history, dropped in via a spacetime wormhole. It has dual SIM handling, too, and came with a bizarre auxiliary battery festooned with warnings about not pressing a button mounted on the front of the top-up device."
haha its a pain some of these people try to sell them at near retail prices, when the customer finally gets the product they are very shocked.
he who controls the spice controls the universe
You know I'm almost never ceasing to be amazed by the effort and dedication of people who bootleg.
So much hard work. So much time spent working out how to design, construct, and replicate just close enough to make the sale and in some places even make a 'moderately' working replica.
If only the bootleggers could be recruited to actually create and sell your product!
On another thought you have to wonder on a component standpoint some of the bootleggers/replicators (wow sounds like I'm talking about some robot race) throw it all together with all that effort and sell it so cheap when a suitably crappy real version can cost quadruple or more!
I do what I must because of what I must do.
the iPhony!
Arrested?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
From TFA: The final nail in the coffin was an app we found five screens in, which even allowing for "cultural differences" Apple would never allow through the approvals process. The app in questions showed a lissom Asian lady lying on a bed who wriggles and moans suggestively when you rub your finger over her.
So Apple would not allow this, but we can have like 100 fart apps? That's pretty messed up.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Ashens did a review of one of these a while ago (the menu does not look identical, but the resolution of the screen + font seems similar).
Sharing purely because I found it fairly amusing (especially the call dropping feature...)
A guy I work with has one of these he bought in China. If it has a removable battery and Java it might be a good thing to own.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This is exactly what the new 'Anti-counterfeiting Treaty' currently being negotiated in secret is meant to protect us from!
Moral of this story - Don't buy a smart phone after you've been drinking all night and especially not one from said bar! I mean, come-on, everyone knows bars don't sell phones they sell hookers and blow!
It's even better than the iPhone:
- two SIMs
- user-changeable battery
- unlocked
but here's my favorite:
- "drag and drop files through USB port of computer (No Software Required)"
No mandatory iTunes. Eat that, Steve!
Why? How is buying something in a bar different from buying it off (say) craigslist?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Yep, but at least this one comes pre-jailbroken.
This thing is far more useful than an iPhone!
I recently spotted a waiter with an iPhone in a third-world country so I went over to ask him about it. But it quickly became obvious that it was a fake. The sad thing is, I don't think the guy knew it. He said his mom paid $120 for it but it was basically unusable. You had to press real hard on the screen and the location calibration was way off (I'd played with another fake iPhone when I was in Laos and it was much better than this one). I showed him mine and the way it's supposed to work, with just a light flick of the finger.
Once I'd convinced him it was a fake, he asked me how much fakes like his go for in the U.S. I told him we don't have the fakes because you can get a new real one for $99 (with two-year contract). I ended up talking to the guy for a half-hour and it was a learning experience for both of us. But I felt bad for the guy, having spent several months' salary on a phone that barely worked (and possibly thinking that Apple makes such poor products)
I wouldn't at all be surprised, especially for the rediculously low selling price, if it's got botnet software embedded right into it, and this is part of an overall plan to create a wireless and mobile botnet. Either that, or a tool for direct identity theft or worse.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
does the phone work?
An iPhone running Windows Mobile 6.x?
In other words, an iPhone that can run GS Player and Opera? And can use it as USB storage? And for $40?
I'm sorry, but I don't see a down side here.
When you buy a name-brand item from someone you don't know on the street or in a bar, you get a cheap knock-off.
Film at eleven.
This sounds a lot like White Van speaker scams
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_van_speaker_scam/
If that is the case, expect it to be made from cast-off electronic components with a failure rate not unlike a Yugo
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Here's an interesting video review of a fake iPhone on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2tVE7qRLwk
... than this guy.
And that "Asian lady lying on a bed who wriggles and moans suggestively when you rub your finger over her. " is exactly the Axe Feather game; wonder if they actually ported Flash to that phone.
Alright, so I made that whole story up.
That was obvious from the subject line.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
A full description would have been most interesting, but this was just a glance description. From TFA's own author: "I got my hands on it for basically 2 15 minute contacts."
Please re-title as What /. Gets When You Buy a $40 Editor In a Bar.
Sounds like a better premise than the the last ~500 movies of the week on Syfy.
I *just* ordered one of these from eBay yesterday. I needed a cheap unlocked phone, this option was cheaper than most name-brand used phones and at the price I paid, I won't be terribly upset if it's complete garbage.
I bought a HiPhone a while ago, and promptly sold it for being amateur hardware.
It was a reasonable fascimile, but anyone who compares it to the real thing wouldn't be fooled for a moment.
Of course, a HiPhone isn't a counterfeit (I guess), but a clone. I'm not sure if there's a real difference, but it too supported a number of features I liked over the iPhone, including dual SIM, expandable memory, and being unlocked.
It was still awful, so I bought a Sony Ericsson and just when it was getting time to upgrade, the Nexus One was released.
I can't even imagine using a regular phone now.
. . . a bizarre auxiliary battery festooned with warnings about not pressing a button mounted on the front of the top-up device.
What happened when you pressed the button?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
i bet it'll run flash before the iphone does.
I initially bought one of these as a joke.
At first I hated it, but it really grew on me. Having an unlocked iPhone form-factor phone, that I can transfer anything I want to it, pictures, music, movies, all over usb, is really nice. I took it traveling and really liked having two batteries, especially after I started reading books on it. Say what you want about the new eBook readers, but I love having a backlit screen that can fit in my pocket, fit hundreds of books on microSD cards, and has a backup battery. I could read clearly at night in bed or waiting for the subway in poorly lit areas.
It's really funny to watch an iPhone user try to use my phone, because even though it looks nearly the same, the screen handles way differently, needing more of a tap than a slide.
I wouldn't buy one of these for running apps on, I would just use it for an eBook reader and phone. That's all I wanted out of it and it exceeded my initial expectations.
This is the one I have: http://product.madeinchina.com/CECT-i9-Quadband-Unlocked-Dual-Sim-PDA-Smart-phone/10618567.shtml
If all you want is a unlocked phone and eBook reader with awesome battery life, give it a try. But the article is right that it can't compare to an iPhone. The user interface sucks compared to Apple's product, especially when you move into the submenus.
What the hell did he THINK he was going to get for his money? In a freakin' BAR?
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
I recently bought a fake blackberry at the Official Beijing Fake Market for 40$, and I love it. (I think the case is similar to the Blackberry 8900)
Dual sim, QWERTY keyboard, good screen, fast (and stable) firmware, excellent battery time (thanks to 3700mAH battery), bluetooth, can be used as a webcam via USB, TV Tuner, and the list goes on! It even has a lot of options my previous 'real' phones did not have, like saving texts directly to MMC. (8gb supported).
Here's the kicker:
It's a full J2ME phone so I managed to install many apps, including Google Maps and Opera 5.2, which both work excellent.
It's excellent build quality, but if this one breaks I'm buying a "Chinese Copy Phone" again.
600RMB (~60 EUR) would get you a touchscreen phone from ChangHong with integrated stylus and character recognition (Chinese and Latin, but it's error prone), high resolution display (480*x?), two SIMs, music player, straight mini USB interface, driverless USB mass storage interface, 8GB integrated, up to 32gb via SDHC micro and a 2.5Mpixel camera. And the phone can be set to English (with some Engrish in the mix of course). Bluetooth yes, but no 3G, no WiFi.
Hmm, so it has less space than a Nomad, and no wireless...
With open source operating systems available to replace the legally dubious copies of Windows Mobile and Nucleus RTOS that these phones use at present, the chinese phone market will not only have a flourishing Android ecosystem itself, but be able to sell these phones into the west with little impediment. . Genius Google, pure genius.
MichaelSmith, age 5: "But what was the underlying cause? Was he in search of food? Was he being pursued by a predator? Was there a potential mate on the other side of the road?!?"
MichaelSmith, age 10: "Technically they never found any parts of the astronauts washed up on the beach, which makes that a single entendre!!"
MichaelSmith, age 15: "All mammal meat is RED!! Plus the anatomies are completely different. OJ wouldn't necessarily be any better at cutting a turkey than anyone else just because he allegedly murdered someone."
MichaelSmith, present day: "That doesn't even make sense! There were eight years between the Challenger disaster and the OJ Simpson trial, and supposedly I only aged FIVE years?!?!"
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I'd watch it.
Does he have to fight a giant ice spider as an earthquake spontanteously causes volcanos to gush forth boa constrictors?
You see the iphone-wannabes on ebay, craigslist, etc, all the time. Even more impressive is how little time it takes the counterfeiters to crank out the clones. A while ago I did a search on ebay for the blackberry 8520 - which is a pretty recent model - and came up with quite a few clones along with the genuine phones. They even list them as "8520", and they fake the RIM blackberry logo, but they don't mention until the end of the listing that the phone is is a fake. A fake with many similar features and a much lower price, that is.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You got something against snakes?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I'd be scared to try to use this for anything but maybe passing some idle time playing games.
I mean, think about it. The OS and core apps are developed in China. I'd be afraid if I use Chinzilla to read my e-mail on this thing, even if by WiFi, it would be "phoning home" to the people who installed the software to let them know where I'm going, what I'm doing, and oh, here are his passwords. Good luck reporting or prosecuting that identity theft.
Arrested as in beer, not as in speech.
Odd how they decided to rip off some icons for the interface but not others. And some of the ones they did rip off were used for unrelated apps like the Safari browser icon for an app named "Compass." Strange.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Since Android is open source, couldn't they just use it and skin it to mimic the iPhone? That would be free and legal, and potentially make this a pretty cool device.
mammal meat is RED
False, see pork, babies.
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One of my colleagues once bought a cheap Chinese MP4 player but it had a Sony battery and got so hot it melted in his pocket. When the doctor cut away his pants to examine the damage it turned out that China had actually partially merged into his leg -- he now has a large chunk of Asia in his lower hip. Pretty disgusting but there are some great camping sites near his knee.
Now he's Chinaman, fighting against injustice by kicking evildoers with a leg that weighs several billion metric tons, which tends to hurt them a lot. His arch nemesis is every single Chinese citizen because they're not too thrilled about some random twit constantly tossing their entire country around. Also, the local tram company; fitting China into a tram is really difficult. He also can't fight injustice during Chinese New Year as his leg goes home to be with its family.
Okay, so I made that up. The tram company doesn't really hate him.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
In many ways it's not about the technology at all. It's not like the iPhone represents things which are that far ahead of the technological curve.
It's about piggybacking on Apple's huge marketing presence and brand-name-recognition.
Those bootleggers could use the same amount of technical "hard work" to create a distinctive and useful device which does 80% of what an iPhone does at 20% of the cost... And then fail to make any money at all because everyone would buy the iPhone anyway.
Too bad we don't live in a world where the substance of technology always wins over the form of its marketing presence. But hey, anyone running Linux knows that :p
This reminds me of when Matsumura Fishworks and Tamaribuchi Heavy Manufacturing Concern merged.
Sold me! Where do I get one of these "special" iPhones?
Table-ized A.I.
What, /. has nothing else to report so they post things about stuff that happened 2 years ago? Anyone can go on ebay and get a sciphone/i9 iphone knock off for about 50 quid shipped to your door new.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x2E1ZL_7O0
He has two of them actually. He ordered one, and got two. Anyways, it was not as convincing as the author of this post lead us to believe. Yeah, it was similar, but once the screen is turned on, I could see it was not an iPhone.
You will never have experience until after you needed it.
Why was it felt necessary to submit the story with $40 in the title instead of £25? The fake iPhone wasn't bought for $40, it was bought for £25. Come to that, why wasn't it felt necessary to prefix the dollar sign with an indication of which country's currency it refers to? Given Slashdot it based in the US and given current exchange rates I assume it refers to the US dollar, but the US is not the only country which uses dollars.
Why was it felt necessary to submit the story saying that the fake iPhone was bought in a bar, when the article says it was bought 'down the pub'?
Does the submitter not think Slashdot readership is capable of understanding things unless they're translated in to US terms?
this gentleman certainly got off light, when one considers what most things you can pick up in a bar for £25 get you.
"Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor" -- Ovid, Metamorphoses
Not much, both are probably stolen and or fake. It is the price not the place.
I just think I stumbled across where you can find this unit for about $100 buck's
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.32675
TVG10 2.8" Touch Screen Dual SIM Quadband Dual Camera TV GSM Cell Phone w/Wifi and JAVA (Black)