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Comment by tslmy | Hacker News Reader

Oh yes, thanks for bringing up the pre-Android-era Shanzhai phones. Were they on WinCE? I was too young to get my hands on one for any first-hand experience.

They were... creative!

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They were almost all on pirated WinCE, not even windows mobile. It might have been all pirated WinCE, but an open sourced Android obviously killed all of that (circa 2010? I don’t remember exact dates but I had a friend working as an engineering manager on the Kin team who talked about it a lot at lunch).

Would you be able to spare some time and find us some references here? Despite a native Chinese speaker, I can't seem to gather up the correct terms on baidu.com google.com to get me relevant materials on that pre-Android-era mobile OSes.

See the comment cousin of yours. I didn’t find much, and what I did find was mostly stuck in PDFs.

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

Learning everyday!

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