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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."
One of my colleagues in China recently bought one of these for his college-age daughter, as a sort of joke. OK, so in the first 10 minutes of owning it he finds this app with the lady...not so good. But still maybe worth gifting to SOMEBODY as a joke. So he puts it in his pants pocket, gets back to his hotel, and falls asleep watching TV.
Next day he comes into work with a strange rash on his neck. He looks surprised, says something about it being the same undershirt he wore yesterday. Somebody says, "hey Len take your shirt off," so he does, and LO AND BEHOLD the rash is like 50x worse down by his belt. He takes his trousers off, peeks beneath his boxers and sort of yelps.
There the "iphone" he bought had partially merged into his leg -- he now has a touch screen in his lower hip. Freaking disgusting.
Alright, so I made that whole story up. But man, if Chinese technology isn't so exciting and freaking scary at the same time!!!! Let that be a lesson to you.