“Arey, Yeh Toh China Ka Mobile Hai” : Here”s Why You Should Steer Clear Of Phones That Are Made In China

By Spandan Ghose Chowdhury:

India has grown as an astonishingly connected country in the last two decades. From the era when having a telephone at home was considered as a luxury, we have emerged as a country which sells 8.35 million telephones a month. Currently we have 960.9 million phones in the hands of Indians that make us larger than the US as a telephone market.

Unlike the phones that the common people used, there was particular a set of phones — smartphones — that were not in the horizon of the common mass. But suddenly within a few years these phones reached every single person at almost one-third the cost of smartphones coming from popular big brands. Courtesy the Chinese smartphone companies which obviously have no popular established brand to boast of.

The Chinese ‘non-branded’ phones, as they are promoted, with almost same features as the costly smart-phones were offered at very low prices and thus started going deep into the market. And as “empty vessels make most noise”, people without knowing anything substantial but going crazy over the flashy factor of these phones, started spending their money on them like the world was coming to an end.

Yes, they indeed look almost as attractive as the famous brand smart-phones are. But what remained as an uncertainty, is the quality of these phones. After all, the buyers buy these phones to experience a famous branded mobile phone at a low cost. The reasons why they are performing defectively are many.

1. Appearance:

Branded phones often have very large teams of researchers whose job is to design the look and feel of a phone. They spend countless hours testing different appearances and designs in an effort to come up with a phone that is good-looking and is within the price range that has been set. Chinese ‘fake’ phones almost always skip this step. They most commonly will buy a case molding and then fill that with their own components.

2. The Internal Chipset Of The Phone:

Branded phones which have chipsets with high MHz processing speeds are paramount to being able to run some of the latest apps and functions on the phone. But Chinese smart phones which are very low on cost, use old first generation chipsets that do not allow all the standard phone functions.

3. Operating System:

All famous branded smartphones use separate Operating Systems (OS) for different sets according to the kind of job it has to perform. And the research team spends a huge amount of time in finding out a suitable OS for a particular phone. But non-branded Chinese companies use the same OS for all the handsets, which most often does not support or perform the applications well.

4. User Interface:

Phones from famous brands will employ a user interface that is custom tailored to their platform. It is built on the basis of their OS. So that, they can have a unique look and feel that separates them from other cell phones. Chinese phones are also able to make different user interfaces even if they are only using the nucleus OS. Many times however, they use this ability not to make a brand new UI that could distinguish them from the other UIs, but to make the UI look and act like one from a famous phone.

Even though China makes high-end good quality phones, these non-branded phones hardly match the level of the ones that come from famous brands. One piece of advice for those who are looking for ‘branded’ goods from China is that they may offer ‘real’ cell phones at absurdly low prices, and even during live demonstrations, they might look perfectly genuine, but there is a chance of you being duped with a fake one. Keep that in mind when you purchase your phones the next time.