This is really not true. Yeah if you buy from a street stall or an unbranded phone counter you’ll probably get fake. Go to a branded Samsung store in a big shopping mall and you will get genuine (and it will be priced almost the same as in the west). You can also buy direct from the mobile networks shops (True, AIS etc) and they only sell real ones.
Also if you just want a cheap Android phone for Facebook etc then some of the chinese brands are excellent value and decent quality, particularly Huawei and Xiaomi make pretty solid phones.
(source: live in Bangkok)
Yeah if you just want a cheap phone, you’re better off getting a “genuine fake” eg a not well known chinese brand rather than a knock off Samsung. You’ll get better specs for the the same price.
It’s not really that surprising since Samsung, Apple, Sony all make phones in China. Intellectual property protection is almost worthless in China, so the same factory that makes genuine Samsung phones will also sell off parts for the fakes, sometimes they just use the lower grade parts that didn’t meet quality control for one of the major brands. Of course contractually they are not supposed to do this, but its extremely rare for any foreign company to win against a chinese company in a legal contract dispute.
I can tell you the real devices are not US$150 in Bangkok. I recently bought a new smartphone in this very same city – just a smartphone, not a notebook or tablet or anything fancy – here in Bangkok. A Samsung Galaxy J7 (2016). I bought it from an actual Samsung shop and paid about 9000 baht or $257. A notebook or tablet would have been much higher. In fact, whereas 25 or 30 years ago electronic devices were much cheaper in this part of the world, they seem to be much cheaper in the West today. Thais planning trips to the US or Europe will shop there for devices … if they want a real one.
There are plenty of cheap alternatives in Thailand to the real stuff. Sometimes they’re brand-name fakes, other times they’re just local no-name brands. Sometimes they’re great, sometimes not. If your M-i-L bought her device in a shop, I doubt it was stolen, but I’d be very doubtful about any kind of warranty offered.
Earlier this month, I fucked up our camera in Cambodia. I’m now looking at getting a Canon M3, but I’ll wait until I get to Hawaii next month, because shopping around on the Internet, I see I can find it for $100-200 cheaper there than in Thailand. Stuff – real stuff – just isn’t as cheap here as it used to be.
The screen is the big one, but there are lots of places costs can be shaved off.
The battery could be not as big, and certainly much lower quality.
The flash could be much less than stated, and slower/crappier. It’s pretty easy to make the OS display “32GB” on a few screens, but actually have much less storage.
Any of the parts could be castoffs that didn’t meet spec.
Most modern components have a certain failure rate at the manufacturer. Some of the chips aren’t quite in spec, or run too hot, or glitch when put through the initial burn-in tests. You can buy the failing parts really cheap, since they’re not actually good for what they’re intended for. And, if you’re careful about design and what kinds of failures you use, you can even make good reasonably reliable products with the stuff that doesn’t meet spec. Or you can just shove a bunch of them into a crappy product, put a fake label on it, and who cares if the thing is glitchy and has crappy battery life and fails after 6 months, because the sucker who bought it is long gone.
There is also a huge secondary market for damaged units. Lots of places will pay you $20-50 for a $500 phone with a damaged screen which they will replace with an aftermarket screen and resell for $250.
You would be floored how many people discard an easily fixed phone like this.
Forget damaged phones. People replace perfectly working phones all the time, e.g., to get a newer model.
I was watching a doctor recently access her iPhone looking for an app. She had a huge number, she swiped screen after screen looking for it. I told her she had waaay too many apps on her phone. (The more apps you have, the higher the chances of malware.) She said it was getting incredibly slow and she was going to get a new one. As opposed to taking it to an Apple store and have them save her data, wipe, and restore (just the really needed apps).
People toss out perfectly fine devices all the time when they “become” slow. They just need some gludge clearing.
iPhones don’t slow down because you have too many apps installed, and Apple is pretty good about blocking malware from being approved for the App store or yanking them if they discover something sneaky.
But yeah phones are now a fashion item, so gotta get the latest one even though last years is perfectly fine.
The thing about faking an Android phone is that you can put inside almost anything. If the external look of the device is close enough to pass muster it will sell. Internally it can be almost any cruddy platform that can run at least some version of Android. Many people actually don’t care - it is like buying a cheap Rolex fake - one that will only pass muster with a casual glance to someone who only knows what a real one looks like by looking at the ads in a glossy magazine.
You can’t reasonably fake an iOS device - there is far too much Apple locked down security, including proprietary chip designs needed to make the OS run. I have heard of really nasty iPhone look alike that was no more than a very cheap Android phone in an iPhone clone case with a tiny bit of re-skinning of the UI. Nobody using it could have mistaken it for a real iPhone, but to a casual glance, it may have looked OK. It is possible that fake iPhones could reskin older second hand models.
Moving up to a fake that would fool a buyer of an Android phone would need more work, but it could at least actually run Android. A very naive user may remain fooled for some time.
What people do care about, is the camera and the quality of the pics, especially here in asia for the perpetual posting of selfies to facebook, line, whatsapp, wechat, twitter, instagram etc etc.
How many of us have actually seen a Rolex close up and could then distinguish it from a good fake? Sure it wouldn’t pass muster at the millionaires’ ball, but it would in most nightclubs.
I have one somewhere - My father went to Kuala Lumpur and bought half a dozen for $5 each. He gave them as presents all around the family and they really looked convincing. I Think mine stopped working after a couple of years, but I didn’t wear it very often.
I’m something of a watch nerd, so I would be harder to fool than most. I will say that the cheap fakes really are pretty awful. An old mate of mine used to buy copy-watch fakes all the time, and delighted in winding me up about how cheap his watches were. One day, we were at lunch when he had got back from a trip, and he said “I’m going to annoy you with my new fake Omega watch.” and handed over a cruddy fake. My replay was, "well I’m going to annoy you even more: and handed to him the real one on my wrist*. The difference was just silly. In comparison the fakes looked liked you had gone to a primary school and asked the kids to make a model of a watch out of recycled aluminium foil and jam jar lids. Then again, there are fake Rolexes that are so good that in a side by side comparison most people would not be able to pick the fake reliably.
It was a present. As much as I like watches, actually spending that sort of money is not something I would be up for.
I didn’t say that having too many apps directly led to the phone slowing. It increases the chances that you have apps that are behaving badly. I call them malware even though some might not call them that. The stuff that so-called “legitimate” apps do that is completely unnecessary and intrusive is astonishing. People need to be more aware have the crappy things apps do even if you got them from a legitimate app store. I.e., why does some video player need to access your contact list and call records?
And trusting any app store to filter out all malware is foolish.
I don’t know about Huawei, but do you have evidence of this for Xiaomi? As far as I know, Xiaomi has specifically demurred on entering the US and European phone markets. Are you just referring to third party imports?