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What You Get When You Buy a $40 iPhone In a Bar

Posted by timothy on from the cheap-thrills dept.

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."

14 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. Never fails to astound... by Shatteredstar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Never fails to astound... by orlanz · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. High Standards by Itninja · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:High Standards by Shatteredstar · · Score: 5, Funny

      So its a cheap softcore porn device? I could see a market for this thing in bars everywhere!

      --
      I do what I must because of what I must do.
  3. Awesome review by DavidR1991 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...)

  4. Better value per dollar by phoenix321 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:Better value per dollar by phoenix321 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  5. so in other words by commodoresloat · · Score: 5, Funny

    This thing is far more useful than an iPhone!

  6. Re:Sorry dude, it's fake by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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;
  7. Re:Ya, but by Neil+Blender · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Even if it doesn't, that's almost as good as the phone in an iPhone.

  8. Re:Sorry dude, it's fake by EvanED · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".

  9. Re:So? by Existential+Wombat · · Score: 5, Funny

    A notice comes up saying "Please Do Not Press This Button Again"

  10. Re: What You Get When You Buy a $40 iPhone In a Ba by StikyPad · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  11. Re:Sorry dude, it's fake by EvanED · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.