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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."
I can speak from experience that Chinese no-name dual-SIM touchscreen phones are way better than their price point and reputation would suggest.
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.
It looks like this (I don't know if that is the model I played with, it looks only vaguely similar)
http://img.alibaba.com/photo/263983686/ChangHong-F8-mobile-phone.jpg
An interesting feature is text-to-speech for names stored in the address book: it actually read the name of a caller in understandable English. Caller not in the adressbook with CLIP enabled had their numbers spelled aloud. In Chinese only of course :)
One feature I was very content with is the battery time: it has a 4000mAh battery - NiMH, not Li-Ion but still. A solid two weeks of battery power with medium amounts of talking time in between is more than impressive. Within the 600 RMB package was a second identical battery, a charging station, a 5V USB charger that could be substituted with any other 5V USB charger that exists. That way, you could always keep one battery charged and switch as soon as the other battery got low. Memory effect shmemory effect - you'll get a brandnew original battery for 5 EUR, so it's no problem charging the thing whenever you need to. Maybe Li-Ion is overrated and the situation where a memory effect would be noticeable isn't that common. I mean, who recharges their phone daily?
Measured in value-per-dollar, this thing was great. Downsides and eventual deal-breakers were some Engrish remains in the menu but the worst was some menus that were in Chinese only, no translation available. The games for example, but also some SMS sub-menus.
When (not if!) ChangHong gets around to translate the firmware with all submenus and iron out the last kinks, this will devastate the lower end cellphone market.
Its called the 3rd shift. You have Chinese factories that just keep the assembly line running for a third unoffical shift. The local assembler, nor the US company really cares enough to stop them. Not to mention the incentives from the under the table dealings.
Why doesn't the US company stop them? Cause the markets that they really care about and make profit in (US and Europe) have heavy enough disincentives to make bootlegging insignificant in comparison to the costs of further stopping them. Plus, the majority of the bootlegging sector can't or won't afford your product anyway. They aren't a customer to begin with, so why stop them from subsidizing your purchasing costs to the 3 shift vendor.
Now when politics hits the fan or someone gets greedy under the table, all Ell breaks loose.... for a week and then freezes over again. As to address gmack's post further down, most mass produced hardware is like lego blocks. You just need a smart enough individual in electrical engineering to put things together in the right order (trust me, that's not a scarcity in most of the world). So its not too hard to put an extra solid disk chip, sim reader, flash light, or even add a FM component when you are already the assembler who has access to the _expensive_ specs, the assemblers, AND the manufactures behind them. Not to mention, most hardware will automatically support the additional stuff as its already built in, but for high, profitable yield ratios, those features are disabled or not used (See AMD Phenom II X series for an excellent example). This is why the third shift stuff is such a hit or miss, its doesn't have proper QC to minimize the defects. If they did, it would be VERY expensive... more so than the original.