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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."
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.
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!
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.
How much is "$99 (with a two year contract)"?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Even if it doesn't, that's almost as good as the phone in an iPhone.
Why not? It sounds at least as good as any other cheap touchscreen phone at a quarter of the price.
Not that I want to dispute your overall point of that's what you're counting, but a contract that binds you to another $1700 outlay over 2 years isn't much of a "technicality".
i bet it'll run flash before the iphone does.
That's the can do spirit that has made America what it is today!
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Most cell phones in the US are subsidized. You can pay the $99 and then the 2-yr contract or the unsubsidized price of $599. It's your choice...
Apple won't sell me an unlocked iPhone. Amazon doesn't have it, nor does Newegg.
Another point to make is that Apple has no control over what AT&T will charge you for the contract.
Not directly, but the fact that they only sell an AT&T-locked version means that I must go through AT&T to use get one. If Apple wasn't so restrictive, I could buy an unlocked version from them and use it with my existing AT&T account, or my T-Mobile account.
The only point of contention is that the iPhone is only on AT&T at the moment.
As far as I'm concerned, that's like saying "the only difference between 0 and 1 is that they aren't the same."
For example you can't use a T-Mobile Motorola RAZR on Verizon's network. You have to buy a Verizon Motorola RAZR(v3) because it uses a different band.
Ah, but I can buy an unlocked Razr and use it on either AT&T's network or T-Mobile's network.
That is why basically all phones are subsidized. Most people don't know how to count, so they think that $1800 is less than $120.
Arrested as in beer, not as in speech.
Buy one overseas, then. The US is the only country where you can't buy unlocked iPhones.
I'd rather buy from a company that actually wants my money; Apple apparently doesn't.
It's not Apple who is being restrictive, but AT&T - see above point that iPhoines are sold unlocked everywhere outside the US.
And whose choice is that? Apple's. It's their phone.
They're the company that chose to make the exclusive deal with AT&T. Without Apple, AT&T wouldn't have any say in the matter.
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
Well, it's worth noting that regardless of the phone used, most people with a smartphone will subscribe to a talk+data+text plan costing in the neighborhood of $100/mo. So, if you're going to pay that much anyway...
The guy got a functioning touchscreen smartphonefor £25. Counterfeit or not, it's hard to call that a ripoff IMHO.
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?