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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."'"
It's sold under the Apple brand.
If I could pay $20 for a crappy low-end phone that ran Android that would last 6 months, I'd seriously consider it. At that rate, I'd spend $40/yr. which is under half the price I pay now for a cheap Virgin phone (which I buy outright).
If it was $30 and lasted a year, that'd be even better.
Sure, the prices aren't there yet, but more competition is only going to drive prices down.
If that was the case Apple would never have sold a single iPhone
I'll get my coat..
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?
So what?
The bulk of the cost of owning a smart phone is the cellular service.
If your phone costs $50, $250, $450, $650, it's about 5-15% of the total cost of ownership.
In other words, if you're looking more closely at the cost of the phone rather than the functionality of the phone, you're missing the point of owning a smartphone.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
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.
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BMO
Yeah, we use ZTE modems (embedded stuff) at work. It's a tossup between the support and the product as to which is actually worse. None of our vendors enjoy selling ZTE products. Our standard policy is to ship the modems from the vendor to ZTE to ensure proper configuration. We've had one batch that was provisioned for a Chinese telecom, so we ended up "roaming" on our carrier and were assigned IP addresses owned by a Chinese company. All of the ZTE documentation for this particular modem is for the latest version of the firmware (which is not backwards compatible with the previous version of the firmware). Well, despite sending all of these things back to ZTE, only a handful of the modems have the current, documented version of the firmware. Despite asking for documentation for the older version of the firmware, ZTE has refused to provide any. Their solution is to recall hundreds of modems, ship them to ZTE and hope for the best. The firmware is not user updatable.
No. Thanks.
I feel for any carrier that things hawking ZTE phones will be a reasonable experience.
The revolution will be mocked