Tech Trend: Shanzhai (2009)
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Admittedly I don't know anything about this beyond OP's 15-year-old blog post.
Xiaomi basically killed Shanzhai smartphones (the sector of all Shanzhai techs chosen by the OP) by releasing Xiaomi (and later Redmi) smartphones.
Xiaomi made Android smartphones affordable. How affordable? Here's a clip of the debut event of Xiaomi's first smartphone back in 2011:
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Xx411v7XX/
Scrub to 01:54. That's a table of the flagship smartphones at that time. The last column of the table is the price in CNY. 3k, 4k, 5k -- around that range.
Now scrub to 03:20 where their CEO announced the MSRP. Listen to that 30-second-long "wow". Look at that price. The astonishment was real.
That's the price range of Shanzhai smartphones.
On a flagship-spec'd smartphone.
That's monumental in the history of smartphone evolution in China. Ask any friend of yours born & raised in mainland China. I bet none would argue otherwise.
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Disclaimer: I moved to the US in 2017, and my experience since then with tech trends in China has been scarce.
A lot of the design team (almost all Chinese) I worked with at Microsoft China 07-09 moved over to Xiaomi to help found their UX design team (I see one is now a UX director at xiaomi, he was an intern in 2007), which I found pretty cool. They had previously done a lot of Windows Mobile work, and were really committed to trying out some of their wilder designs.
They were... creative!
Edit: here is one article discussing a specific Shanzhai phone. https://drprem.com/tech/cect-t32-apple-cant-approve-this-clo...
I’m pretty sure it’s Windows CE and not WinMo, most reviewers weren’t concerned about the difference. WinCE was the core of WinMo (well, until windows phone), but it was easier to just take winCE and skin it since they didn’t really want the WinMo UI (this phone has an iPhone copycat UX).
Here is another one with WinCE listed as the OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meizu_M8
> Part of the reason for this is the low investment in new technology by Shanzhai phone makers and their dependence on cheap and freely available chipsets from companies like MediaTek and Huawei running pirated operating systems, like Windows Mobile. Industry analysts believe the near future won't deliver a dramatic improvement of the usability of the pirate phones.
There really was no other option before android came out, since Symbian was never pirated (I think).
If that was understanding within MS China, I wonder whether that had an impact on MS' strategic decisions - whether they thought CE/WM has great market penetration in China and required changes from existing platform to WP is minimal...
1: https://www.mobile01.com/topicdetail.php?f=165&t=1691816 2: https://ascii.jp/elem/000/000/963/963878/img.html
It definitely made for a lot of jokes, but I don’t think the executives, at least on the MS china side where I was working, took it as a good omen at all. These were junk phones, and the iPhone at the time clearly wasn’t junk. That WinMo was shortly thereafter abandoned makes me think Redmond thought so as well.
Microsoft also locked down WP, so it wasn’t pirate-able, and since Android was already out a couple of years later when Wp was done and was basically free (no need to pirate!), well, everyone lost interest in whatever Microsoft was doing with mobile.
http://xahlee.info/comp/TRON_operating_system_and_encoding.h... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYfoCe6q28A
Full motion video on a 286!
What I love is how we can get iphones or other apple stuff repaired within the hour for 10 USD at random street shops, sometimes a small walk away from flagship Apple stores that charge hundreds of dollars for someth that doesnt seem to be sourced differently or at least works just as well.
I dont know how people can live in trademark-enforcing countries now. But maybe it wouldnt scale if no design could be profitable middle-term ?
As a side note, I got a huawei phone recently and I couldnt believe how good it was compared to an iphone: it last longer, it has way more features that even Android takes time to copy back and it looks very premium. I got some friends almost envious until I confess all the hoops I had to go through to get Google stuff working: that stung.
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/global-social-media/2015/05/06/chine...
It's a shame because we still don't have innovations like TV tuners, am/fm (my LG L70 had an FM-only tuner), or pseudo 7.1 surround sound. Well, we do have surround plugins for Android, but they require root and installing an Xposed module.
Accurate.
The scale of cheap money and "Enterprise Entrepreneurialism" has made it very hard to discern wheat from the chaff, of course.
But I have a strong feeling --and I understand what that word means-- that there is something beyond all the grafts and scams and profiteering in the intersection of Virtual Reality, Crypto-Currencies, Internet of Things, and the availability of the personal computing capacity (ultra-powered smart phones) that is going to change the world, but I can't put my finger on it.
World War III, probably. Wherever that may take place. Seems like Taiwan, Eastern Europe, or the Middle East are the current prime candidates.
Symmetric conflicts is when technology really makes leaps and bounds.
Consider the case of Ukraine and Russian sanctions, all but a sham and politicking with Turkey, China, and even US while being at the helm of sanctions, continue to trade directly or indirectly with Russia.
Reminds me of the famous line attributed to Albert Einstein that, "World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones" because the WWIII can't be but a Nuclear Armageddon.
Look at the financial crisis in china going on that will require loads of stimulus.
I don't think there is really a market for user-replaceable batteries, I have it picked as something the vocal minority want. But this is the productive way for people prove it as being a good idea or not.
It is very depressing that in the EU it would be legislated, in the US there'd be a big fight between the political parties about whether it should be legislated, and the Chinese bureaucrats are presumably too disorganised to mandate any which way so someone just builds it back in '09. Once the US would have been the home of this sort of free market capitalism.
There is a lesson here about bandwidth, governments, IP law and effective strategy.
Why do you think so?
As a gut check, it does make sense people would prefer sturdiness and waterproofing to replaceable batteries and it seems likely that those things pull phone design in opposite directions.
I suspect that if you want a phone designed to different tastes, you will have to buy a phone made by someone else. Like the Chinese one under discussion.
> Because Apple doesn't think it is worth the trade offs and they know a thing or two about making well designed phones.
That is a flawed way of thinking, apple is interested in optimising profits, not well designed phones, or at least not more than sales and revenue.
The question is probably "is the market it represents sufficient to sustain a product line which focuses on it?"
There are plenty of niche manufacturers who prove that you can survive in the smartphone business selling something other than "the exact form factor Apple and Samsung are offering". Oukitel with their 20,000 mAh batteries comes to mind.