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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."
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...)
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!
So much time spent working out how to design, construct, and replicate just close enough to make the sale...
I doubt there was little if any NRE (Non-Reoccurring Engineering) costs involved in the construction of these iPhonies. The price alone strongly suggests the most likely explanation is that the Chinese manufactures making the genuine iPhone, are running their production lines on the side, without Apple's consent.
Apple has handed them the specifications and all the manufacturer has to do is build a few thousand more than what Apple orders. The bootleg manufacturers don't even have to pay for things like molds or automation setup costs. They then fill in any missing pieces (such as software or mute slider switches) with the cheapest thing they can get.
You probably would be surprised at how often this happens with consumer goods built in China.
And it only costs $40?
The article fails to note if there are any bad traits to this phone...
Bottles.
Dual sim means dual sim slots and two recievers so the phone can connect to two networks at once if you don't mind a shorter battery life.
It's a particularly Chinese innovation and not just a small tweak of an Apple design.