[acabal]

This reminds me of when one of my good friends came back from China with a knockoff iPhone. I bought his extra one off him for $50 out of sheer curiosity. Everything this article said about the knockoff tablet vs. the real thing was true for the phone--it was billed as a touch phone and yet came with a stylus, because using it with your fingers was impossible; in fact using it with the stylus was almost impossible too. It had the look-and-feel of an iPhone, but all the apps were clearly just cheap, badly translated knockoffs that were just truly awfully made. The wifi would "connect" but never worked. The screen was scratched after two days of use.

I ended up sending a few text messages with it (it took me 15 minutes to compose each one because of the awful interface) and after messing around with it for a while got so frustrated that I promptly "lost" it.

It was a great conversation starter though--"Hey, want to see my Chinese iPhone?" It always got a laugh out of people when I showed them.

[radu_floricica]

Quality for Chinese products varies, though. A friend of mine uses as a main phone a chinese one, mostly because it can take two sim cards (i.e., two phone numbers). It's good enough for daily, intense use, and as a bonus and laugh factor it also has an antenna and TV included.

That said, my experience with Chinese products and parts has been less then satisfactory. I guess we don't really have any way to discern good products from bad... no "brand recognition" to speak of. It's too bad, because I bet there are a lot of good companies out there making good products.