Slashdot Mirror
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.
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