Must Read Monday: Bye Bye Shanzhai, Hello Mainstream Smartphones

Photo: Close Encounters
To Migrate or not. A wildebeest's dilemma:
"Starvation if I stay,
or risk of being eaten by a crocodile if I go"

Shen Jingting wrote an excellent article for China Daily about the epic migration taking place within the Shenzhen mobile phone industry.

Shen is distinguishing three phases: 

• Production of Shanzhai phones and focus on emerging markets, such as India and Nigeria and delivering to the domestic market.
• Transform into a legitimate supplier with good relationships with operators in emerging markets, also because when a Shanzhai producer is acquiring a high profile it will be vulnerable for IP lawsuits (as happened to "G'Five International Ltd, a Shenzhen-based handset supplier that mainly sells phones in Asian and African countries, and was sued by Nokia in India for alleged infringement of intellectual property rights."). Or working for international brands such as Motorola or Samsung. 
• Follow the Taiwan-based HTC Corp. strategy, that has succeeded in entering profitable markets in Europe and North America. 

There is enough ambition to reach the third phase. Huawei even expects to be a top five global mobile phone supplier by 2014. And ZTE wants to become one of the world's top three mobile phone vendors by 2015.

Read Shen's article here.

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Parallel Universe Shenzhen: Where The iPads Run on Android

Androids have landed on Shenzhen's beach
Photo Danny Friedmann

By Michiel Tjoe-Awie

The market penetration of Google's Android mobile operating system came second, behind Nokia's Symbian but was preferred above Apple's iOS. The iPad is still the most popular “pad”. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have the best of both worlds. I mean that Apple would strike a deal with Google to make a variation of iPad, running on Google's Android operating system. Unthinkable? Why? Just because it should contradict Apple’s goal to dominate the market for operating systems? Remember you once learned the difference between a consumers (demand) market, and a manufacturers (supply) market? If the consumer dictates the manufacturer what to make we talk about a demand market, a manufacturers market works the other way around. The Chinese plan economy was a typical example of the latter. But thinks has changed. Now it provides only what the market wants. No boundaries. The market has made it’s request and has produced a miraculous new product. Something like a beautiful woman that likes to watch football or a child that likes to listen or a dog that doesn’t smell or an iPad with a Android operating system. What? I said: “an iPad with an Android operating system!”

Copycats are not hindered by the animosity between Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt (from Google). So the unthinkable has become true in the parallel universe of cloning:

Neo of Shanzhai reports that the second generation iPad inspired device in that parallel universe for clones, copycats and counterfeiters Shenzhen will be manufactured with a Google's Android 2.2 operating system.
By the way in this case the Apple logo was not used on the clone. Design patents and copyright, and even trademark (for the use of the name iPad or when the form was registered as trademark) might be infringed.
Read the Shanzhai article with pictures of genuine and clone for that parlour game: find the differences here.

Text Michiel Tjoe-Awie

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Is Apple's iPad a Knockoff from Shenzhen Great Dragon Brother's P88, Or Is the Latter A Case Of Pre-emtive Cloning?

Stan Abrams of China Hearsay blogs about Shenzhen Great Dragon Brother's P88, which is very similar to Apple's just released iPad. Mr Abrams, never losing his ironical talent wrote about Shenzen Great Dragon Brother's assertive stance towards IP rights in relation to Apple: "[T]he company apparently filed a design patent, so it’s doing its part to create indigenous IP. All those public education campaigns seem to be working!" Read Mr Abrams' blog here.

Aritz Parra of El Mundo interviewed Mr Wu Xiaolong, CEO of Great Dragon Brother who said that the P88 has been already on the market in China for half a year and was first presented to the world at the International Electronics Fair in Berlin six months ago. Read the article ''Made in China' vs Apple: ¿Quién copió a quién?' in Spanish here.

Earlier, Elaine Chow of Shanghaiist wrote that the P88 was already three months available at the Chinese market, which she calls pre-emtive cloning. Read Ms Chow's article here.

Sometimes Apple has to deal with knockoffs that are better than the real thing, as was the case with the knockoff MacBook Air, read here. Although the P88 has a bigger screen and a much larger disk drive (P88: 160 GB HD versus iPad: 64 GB Flash) and does multitasking and the iPad does not, the P88 has only a battery life of 1,5 hours, while the iPad has 10 hours. Shardendu Gautam compares the technical features for ThinkDigit, read here.

Yesterday, Song Jiang of the site Shanzai.com, that is following the Shanzai (Shan Zhai Ji = 山寨机 , read more about it here ) phenomenon, wrote:

"Just what will happen when the iPad gets launched in China remains to be seen, but I have a feeling that any presiding court in China might just sway in favor of Great Long. This could cause significant ripples in the intellectual property debate surrounding Chinese-made, and more recently, Chinese-designed products and their increasing penetration of traditionally Western dominated markets."

Picture by Shanzai.com.
Read Song Jiang's article here.

UPDATE:

Read Stan Abrams' article 'Shanzhai Saturday: Dawn of a New Era' about double shanzai, read here.

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