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Chinese Smartphone Invasion Begins
snydeq writes "Tech giants Apple, Google, and Microsoft were no-shows at CES this week in Las Vegas, which worked out just fine for Chinese vendors looking to establish a name for themselves with U.S. consumers. 'Telecom suppliers Huawei and ZTE, in particular, have set their sights on breaking into the U.S. market for smartphones and tablets. ... Whether these Chinese imports can take on the likes of Apple and Samsung remains to be seen, but as Wired quotes Jeff Lotman, the CEO of Global Icons, an agency that helps companies build and license their brands: "The thing that's amazing is these are huge companies, and they have a lot of power, but in the United States nobody has heard of them and they're having trouble gaining traction, but it's not impossible. Samsung was once known for making crappy, low-end phones and cheap TVs. Now they're seen as a top TV and smartphone brand."'"
No one wants crappy, low-end phones that will break within 2 hours.
It's sold under the Apple brand.
I have used a LOT of china smartphones. and they all suck badly. really poor Android installs, really REALLY bad hardware. Innovative ideas, I LOVE the dual sim phones, but they either come with batteries that are garbage or the phone it self has QC issues that make it a swing and a miss.
So unless they have a dual core 1.5ghz Android 4.2 phone for $29.00 unlocked... they will not sell many.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
because they're big enough brands to have a show of their own. Why spend the money on an event where you have to fight for attention when you've established your brand enough that the media clamors to be invited to your event?
Branding does matter, and Huawei is rather odd to American ears.
Other than that it'll be all about what they can offer in terms of price, features, and quality. Quality seems to be a big issue for many Chinese brands. They focus on low price above all else, and drive quality down too far. This could be a particular issue in the smartphone market where carries want to lock people in to 2 year contracts. That means that equipment needs to survive for 2 years, or you'll have angry customers.
Where are you getting these non-chinese phones? I haven't seen one in twenty years.
Oh, wait, you were just being an ignorant racist, you don't actually know of any phones that aren't made in China. My bad.
"Still, Hisense products are tough to find in the U.S. outside of Walmart, Amazon.com and Costco.com."
Other than Target, that's everybody that matters in electronics and appliances.
Gotta love it when some asshole comes out of the woodwork to call people racist for no reason.
When you buy an iPhone, Apple is behind that device, even if it's made in China.
Every other position has gone overseas, I want to see some big CEOs here lose their jobs to the overseas companies they helped fund.
Mmm...sweet irony.
I own a ZTE v875, which I got for around 80 euros as a carrier exclusive (TMN Smart A7). The phone is really really good for the value, in fact, I would get it again if something happens to it. It has everything what you would expect from a good Android phone. The GPS is even better, I often get more precision from the location services than my friends with higher end phones. The qwerty keyboard is awesome and the main reason why I bought this phone. There is a minor problem though, you need to use a plastic plug in the headphones jack, otherwise sand and dust comes in and stays between the touchscreen and the LCD - annoying. Other than that, the phone is very serviceable, I already opened it a couple of times to clean the sand / dust. In fact, I even managed to accidentally cut 5 of the LCD flex cable vias while trying to unplug it. Fortunately I have steady hands and a good soldering iron :)
Other than that, I'm stuck with gingerbread. The internal storage is quite small, however I have root access which allows me to move apps around to circumvent the small internal (permanent) memory. The battery autonomy is ok, with 3G on at all times I always have more than 1 day of battery.... if I dont abuse google maps.
More manufacturers wanting to differenciate themselves from the rest means also more diversity on the software front. Thats from where Sailfish, Tizen, Firefox OS, and even Open Web OS phones will come.
The "We have the virtual monopoly so no need to innovate" mentality is about to get a hit (unless they use other tactics counterattack, like claiming that they will attack your privacy (even more than the US government is doing with everything US based), or with patents (after all the Apple fight to ban Samsung phones from US or Europe, this could happen too ).
LG used to be known as Gold Star. Gold Star was known as the "junk" brand of Sears, K-Mart, Zayre (oooh, I'm old) and other stores that targeted the low end consumer.
Gold Star had such a bad reputation that they changed their name to LG which stands for Lucky Gold Star.
Those that pooh-pooh the Chinese brands are ignoring all of the history since WWII. We used to laugh at Honda, Toyota, Kawasaki, Sony, NEC, Yamaha, and all the other Japanese brands, and now they high quality and popular (even luxury brands!). The American car and electronics manufacturers were complacent and we nearly completely lost automobile manufacturing entirely *twice* - only to be bailed out with government loans. We lost consumer electronics manufacturing entirely in the US.
Korean brands used to have a ridiculously bad reputation. Now we have Korean brands that people are more than willing to buy, sometimes preferring them over Japanese brands like Sharp. Hyundai used to be viewed as a disposable car (I had an Excel at one point). Now they are good quality transportation, as good as anything Japanese (but maybe not Infiniti or Acura).
And now we have idiots replying to this story saying that the Chinese will never make higher quality goods, as if the Chinese are somehow inherently inferior. This smacks of denial and racism, frankly, the same kind of denial and racism that we used against the Japanese and Koreans, before the Japanese and Koreans kicked our asses in manufacturing.
It feels good to think that you're superior to other people...but this is delusional. This is why Jared Diamond's book angered so many conservatives - he exposed the environmental, food, and natural transportation advantages people in the Middle East and Europe had over other locations on the planet. He detailed how these advantages were the real reason why European civilization became so successful, instead of some inherent quality of "white" people. And you see this every day. You see it in the denial that "those people over there" can't possibly be as good scientists and engineers as we in the US are.
It's a dumb worldview, and eventually self-defeating, because where the manufacturing goes, the science and engineering goes too. We here in the US are not special. Complacency brings down empires - political and economic both. We have been complacent for 60 years, because we thought the post WWII boom would go on forever.
--
BMO
The thing that's amazing is these are huge companies, and they have a lot of power, but in the United States nobody has heard of them and they're having trouble gaining traction, but it's not impossible
Change "United States" to "China", and you've just described Google's problems when they attempted to expand several years ago. Baidu is still the number one search provider in China. There are plenty more examples of this. It's not easy to predict when a product will find traction in a foreign market.
People have never heard of ZTE and Huawei? http://www.mycricket.com/cell-phones/by/zte http://www.mycricket.com/sitesearch?site=all+mycricket.com&q=Huawei+ Cricket sells them both in the US.
Chinese firms like Huawei face an additional, very complicated hurdle that Japanese and Koreans firms didn't face when they worked their way into the American market, the "taint" that's left on their brands by the Chinese government. When Japanese and Korean firms first came into the US, they "only" had to deal with name brand recognition, quality, etc. While there was some hysteria around Japan Inc. and whatnot buying the US, I would suggest that Chinese concerns are probably even greater, magnified by concerns of military espionage and a messy history between the two nations from 1949 to today. It's not fair, but it's unfortunately a real thing they have to deal with. Thus, they have just that one extra headache they have to deal with, not just convincing that their products are competitive but that they're not out to steal your data and wage war with the United States as well.
I would also add that unlike Japan, they face much stiffer competition entering into the US market with a larger number of well established, well funded players who unlike blindsided American firms, much better understand how the electronics-export game works.
I bought my kids Huwaei Ascend android smartphones several years ago (2010). This so called "invasion" started years ago. If you can even call it that, since I'm pretty sure all smartphones are made in China, aren't they?
And I'm sure apple employs only american expats in its Chinese factories.
Well then instead of abusing him you could just prove you are not a racist prick by just providing citations that show all these hardware devices and phones from china that ship with malware.
I'm sorry I just want to ride the link http://www.gowaberbagi.blogspot.com/2013/01/sms-cinta-romantis.html
Straight from this week's The Economist, http://www.economist.com/news/business/21569398-how-did-lenovo-become-worlds-biggest-computer-company-guard-shack-global-giant
Lenovo is on a roll. It is number one in five of the seven biggest PC markets, including Japan and Germany. Its mobile division is poised to leapfrog Samsung to grab the top spot in China, the world’s biggest smartphone market. This week it made a splash at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with what PC World called “bullish bravado and a seemingly bottomless trunk” of enticing new products.
To focus on PCs, Mr Yang’s [CEO] predecessor sold Lenovo’s smartphone arm for $100m in 2008. Mr Yang bought it back for twice as much the next year. He believes that PCs and other devices will converge, so knowledge of one area will breed expertise in the other. He may be right. Smartphone sales are red hot in China, and Lenovo is now selling mobiles and tablets in several emerging markets
He also thinks Lenovo has a secret weapon. It has kept a lot of manufacturing in-house (why outsource to Foxconn when you already pay Chinese wages?). Mr Yang believes this in-house expertise gives his firm an edge in product development. But Lenovo must exploit that edge better than it has done so far if it is to compete with a technology powerhouse like Samsung and build a global brand anything like Apple’s.
Has anyone seen one of these Lenovo phone critters yet . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
WW2 and the Korean Wars created an indelible prejudice against Japanese and Korean manufactured goods across an entire generation of Americans.
You are just too young to have had a meaningful conversation with anyone from that generation.
That didn't make any sense.
You seem to be arguing with someone that doesn't exist in this thread. I've seen nobody say "China can never make quality hardware." What people are saying is that they will need to make quality hardware, before they'll gain much in the way of US marketshare. Many of us have noticed that goods developed and branded by Chinese companies tend to be cheap at the expense of all quality. That will be a problem in the smartphone market most likely.
I'm quite sure China can produce quality goods, because I own some of them. I've goods that were produced in China, to the spec of a foreign company that are quite high quality. However that does not mean that the goods their domestic companies are choosing to produce are high quality.
Also your whining about complacency and bringing down empires shows a real lack of awareness of the US and the world. For one, you can hardly call the US complacent. Lots of top notch R&D happens in the US, lots of top notch manufacturing. A simple example would be the CPU most likely in your PC: Intel. They have the most advanced fabs in the world, and ruthlessly push the technology curve ahead. And yes, they manufacture in the US dominantly (8 of 11 fabs).
What's more there's nothing to "bring down". The US is a nation, not an empire and guess what? The US doesn't have to be #1 at everything to still be a nice place to live. I've been to a number of countries, all of them by definition not #1 at all the things the US is, and they were all quite nice. Canada, Norway, the UK, all places I would be very happy to live. They don't get to claim many "#1s" but they don't have to. It isn't a situation of "Someone is the best and everyone else sucks."
There is room in the world for a successful China AND US, just as there is room for a successful UK, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and so on.
With all the back doors the Chinese install in the electronics sold in the U.S., would you really want those naked pics of your girlfriend being oogled by some middle-aged Chinese security agent pervert?
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
They are not only cheap models, ZTE its releasing this http://www.phonearena.com/phones/ZTE-Nubia-Z5_id7609 this month. Quadcore processor at 1500 MHz, 5 inches display on 1920 x 1080 pixels and 441 ppi.
I used to work for Lotman. He's a prick.
the phone is so cheap, I can NOT change the ringtone.
I see it used on TV as a "throw away" phone quite often.
Samsung is still making cheap shit that no one wants, they just raised the price on their stuff so you think it's not a cheap piece of shit.
Be seeing you...
I have a couple of connections at a major cell manufacturer. They have been having issues with attacks coming in and stealing all their IP. From which country? You've got it, China.
My sources say that Huawei released a phone last year that contained a firmware bug identical to a phone released slightly later.
Anyone that's in security will tell you how many attacks originate not just in China, but from Chinese government/educational/military institutions. Some will also tell you the relationship that ZTE and Huawei have with the Chinese government.
This should come as no surprise since these attacks from China ramped up after manufacturers refused to turn over trade secrets some years back to the government in exchange for manufacturing stuff there on the cheap.
"You can get a voice/data plan for about $30 a month. But you're not going to want to use it with a smart phone."
And why not? I've seen "smart" people use their smartphones as a combo dumbphone/tablet, effectively turning them into small "phablets" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phablet). Basically you use the expensive data plan for the dumbphone stuff like old-fashioned text-messaging and voice calls, or for quickly checking your social stats. Then you report to the nearest wi-fi hotspot if you want to watch YouTube or stare at your FB profile. This isn't as much as a hassle as you think, if you happen to live in a big city. Incidentally the Chinaphones I've seen happen to have 5" screen, which puts them at the lower end of the phablet category.
My Nokia N8 was made in Mexico.
Hey, at least it's Made in North America!
Unfortunately, it runs Symbian.
Some of us buy our hardware and our plans separately.
If you do differently, well, that's your own problem.
The economic feasibility of that suggestion varies greatly depending on your particular geography, sir.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
Particularly their software has been half baked for android.
The only reason we don't notice it this round is their Nexus 4 had a Quad Core A15 and 2GB RAM. Nothing can slow IT down...just drain the battery.
Chinkphone for cunt. You buy chinkphone you be cunt. Chinky fuck America round eye. Cheap shit throw away we get money.
does it really lack autofocus and gps though?
I owned a Galaxy Spica... i have to thank Samsung for convincing me to switch to an iPhone.
In their defense, my 4-5 years old Samsung "dumb" TV is still perfectly fine. I guess they only fail at "smart" products.
Particles of dust inside the LCD and opening it up periodically is an experience most people do not want to endure, alongside an outdated OS and fragile connections. You got what you paid for, which is fine for you but not many others who want a phone that 'just works.'
I happen to read International Standard English, so please allow me to translate.
"I ain't never heared o' no Chinese hardly-wear with that there mallard-wear on it. Show me some o' that there Chinese hardly-wear with that there mallard-ware on hit, or git raht off mah pond!"
HTH u dood.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Why do you assume that it would just last 6 months? They last a good deal longer.
20-30$ a month is small money in a wester country,but in developing countries, its a lot more.
Let me tell you the India story.
A few years back, when the telecom boom happened, you needed to buy your own phone. Even today very few carriers offer bundles
So you could either spend 150$ approx to buy a nokia feature phone(entry level), or some 300$ to get a more advanced feature phone, and about 600$ to buy a newish smartphone.
Or you could buy a chinese feature phone with no name brand for 100$ which used ot do some web browsing and stuff.
As the advanced smartphones came, LG, samsung etc., found their main market was 10000-15000 INR range. Which is approx 200-300$
The chinese phones were 6000-7000.
Then a few companies decided why not get the "better chinese" phones and rebrand them and offer warranty and stuff. So domestic companies like karbonn and Micromax bloomed.
Cannot afford that 400$ 1.2GZ dual core with 1GB ram
Well there is a dual core with 1GB of ram for 11999 INR (220$) with 1 year warranty.
And as anybody who has worked in electronics will tell you, if it lasts a year, it will last a few more.
The US market is pretty new, but once you have a similar specied phone on contract for half the price, people will take it, because after a year they usually trade in their phones for a newer model.
Another point to note here is that these phones are not junk. If samsung has a 1 in 100 failure rate these guys have around 1 in 60 or 1 in 70. As long as the supplier factors this into the equation and offers customer service, there are not going to be any issues.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
most don't show off phones at CES
that's what MWC is for
Hey, don't get me wrong, the phone just works (TM).
Particles of dust inside the LCD and opening it up periodically is an experience most people do not want to endure
I said I opened it a couple of times... which means.. around two times, not often as you make it sound. The first time was just to inspect the SoC, the second to remove the dust.
and fragile connections
Did you ever seen an LCD flex cable? Yes it is fragile, not just this particular one - specially if you try to pull it using a string (bad idea). So yeah, I broke it and it was my fault. I just wrote the little incident to make people laugh, not to make the phone look bad.
alongside an outdated OS
Yes, the OS is outdated. But do you care explaining me what functionality do latest Android provides that I don't have in gingerbread? I never felt I was missing anything compared to my friends owning higher end models - just a different UI. Gingerbread is actually very stable and fast (I just remember it freezing the UI one time), it allows me to use all Google services. I'm also playing Ingress like some of my friends and I have angry birds installed. The only thing I could not do so far was .. install Chrome, but why would I want Chrome in my phone when the default webkit browser works just fine? (oh and btw, I cannot install it because chrome is compiled for a slightly different instruction set - so, not a gingerbread problem anyway).
You got what you paid for, which is fine for you but not many others who want a phone that 'just works.'
Well, my phone 'just works'. If one day it stops doing it, I can buy it again a couple more times before meeting the price of a higher end model.
If every big company outsources their production facilities to China, what do you expect to happen? Chinese manufacturers will sit on the know-how idly, without taking advantage of it? Of course they'll start manufacturing their own products after a while.
Smartphones, cars, air-conditioners, fridges, ships, armament, you name it. It's inevitable.
I completely failed to mention I own the referred phone for more than 1 year!
Good post and straight to the point. I am not sure if this is really the best place to ask but do you people have any ideea where to get some professional writers? wholesale sunglasses
A $5 phone that lasts about 3 months and then I can bring it in get another one. The key problem isn't the phone it's the 'activation fees' they charge. The upside though is that finally Sprint would get a garbage phone as terrible as their service.
...on a large scale, don't expect Huawei and ZTE to be influential in the US market.
Right now, the "Big Four" of cellphone companies with US operations (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile USA) are mostly pushing well-known brands of cellphones from the likes of Apple, HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung. As such, these five cellphone companies have nearly all of the market share (though Nokia is starting to make a comeback with their Windows Phone 8 based Lumia models), and new companies like Huawei and ZTE may find it very hard to become players in the US market.
I don't get it!
My Apple iPhone 4S is made in China.
My Samsung Galaxy S3 and Samsung Galaxy Note 2 are made in China.
My HTC One X is made in China.
I don't understand the phrase "Chinese Smart Phone." I thought all smart phones are CHINESE SMART PHONES, with different tags (Apple, Samsung, HTC, etc).
Just as the British dismissed the utilitarian products of early American industrialisation during the 1851 Exhibition in London.
Morons like Lumpy just don't get and never will. Samsung made crappy stuff and then they got better. Sony used to make crappy stuff and then they got better AND then they went wallstreet and went crap and all their engineers went to Samsung with a big paycheck and layoff package. And Americans made crappy stuff nobody wanted except cheap grain and meat and then they got better and destroyed British industry.
You start producing crap and cheap clones while learning from doing the assembly of others and then you take over. It happened a LOT of times already and every single time it happens a braindead moron like Lumpy says "I don't want cheap crappy (Chinese/Korean/Japanese/Americas) knockoff's not in my lifetime." And then the world changes and Lumpy is put in a retirement home were his family prays for his dead.
Those who have no braincells never learn from history and are doomed to repeat the same lines while totally oblivious to the real world around them. I know it is not as snappy as the original saying but it is more accurate. Some people never ever learn anything at all ever.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This has gone on LONG before. Do you think it is new for imports to replace local production? It has been going on for literally centuries, no for thousands of years.
2000-3000 years ago people already were massive traders with goods from the north of Europe and the middle east ending up in Switzerland.
The US itself was once nothing more then a little upstart colony but with the changing tech (freezing) it changed British farming forever. Same with the prison colony Australia. Nowadays, south american steak is considered to be of high quality... it was once considered crap but cheap. Same with US corn-fed beef, if you were posh you bought local, only the poor did increase their intake of meat by buying frozen imports. And then it changed.
Dig for Britain during WW2 had at its roots the British belief they could outsource ALL their food production to its colonies. Then shit happened and Britain had to go back to sustenance farming to feed itself. It really is little different from the US being dependant on Chinese products, military, tech and keeping the people happy with cheap stuff. The US is a sold out Walmart away from revolution. And before China, the cheap stuff came from Korea and before that from Japan. And Britian NEEDED, was totally depended on US food and even industry, the country that invented modern agri-culture and the industrial revolution.
We sometimes like to think that we in our times life in an age of global travel but while Magellan famously did NOT travel around the world, his crew did. Ordinary people totally forgotten by history. How many times have you traveled around the world?
REMEMBER where the printing press, CAME from. FROM China. A Chinese import, centuries ago. It was a case of parallel invention, the tech was literally exported from China and imported into Europe. And around it trade in countless goods took place. You may think you are being a bit hip eating foreign foods but Curry has been a staple part of british diet for a LONG time when the locals barely moved beyond their village but were eating food from across the world, mutton from Australia, rice from China. Whenever an ancient ship is found its cargo turns out to be industrial scale goods trafficked between nations long before we tend to think a global economy could have existed.
People have always traded and it has long been clear that even before the romans, in western Europes, goods travelled throughout all of Europe and as trade increased, societies came to depend on the trade. And if trade was really good, a local producer could easily see itself being replaced. England is really one of the core examples of this, its agri-culture had to adapt to massive changes and its industry sadly never did. It is a lesson the world would do well to study and do it for more then "latest asian tiger to produce cheap knockoffs". The US itself was once a knockoff place. Hell, the west itself was to Japan and China centuries ago, sources of cheap goods.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Samsung is still making cheap shit that no one wants
VS
I got a cheap modern samsung phone
No one wants it, he bought it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...that for you, the cost of a smartphone is a very small portion of the overall cost of service because you want far more data per month than many people do. From what I've seen here and elsewhere, you are an outlier. That's fine. There are data plans for you.
For the rest of us, there are far cheaper plans that provide us with what we need, so the cost of a smartphone becomes a significant fraction of the overall cost of service. That's why cheap Android phones are taking off in almost every market where they are introduced.
reading at their mini site http://www.nubia.cn/nubia.html got autofocus for sure but no clue abouth gps.
You happen to be incredibly stupid too. Why're we forced to listen to this babbling idiot?
If you weren't such a chickenshit, you could actually log in and use your account's Awesome Choco-licious Karma Qi Power to downmod me straight to Hell.
Right? Right!
So what's stopping you?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.