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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.
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...)
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!
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!
Even if it doesn't, that's almost as good as the phone in an iPhone.
Well, you could take the time to get to know them. But they'd probably still sell you the cheap knock-off.
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
the universe was completely destroyed and replaced by another universe, identical to the first except it was one in which the button had not been pressed.
A notice comes up saying "Please Do Not Press This Button Again"
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
Sure its a fake, but will it run linux?
Arrested as in beer, not as in speech.
The guy got a functioning touchscreen smartphonefor £25. Counterfeit or not, it's hard to call that a ripoff IMHO.