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.