Chinese Smartphone Invasion Begins

snydeq writes "Tech giants Apple, Google, and Microsoft were no-shows at CES this week in Las Vegas, which worked out just fine for Chinese vendors looking to establish a name for themselves with U.S. consumers. 'Telecom suppliers Huawei and ZTE, in particular, have set their sights on breaking into the U.S. market for smartphones and tablets. ... Whether these Chinese imports can take on the likes of Apple and Samsung remains to be seen, but as Wired quotes Jeff Lotman, the CEO of Global Icons, an agency that helps companies build and license their brands: "The thing that's amazing is these are huge companies, and they have a lot of power, but in the United States nobody has heard of them and they're having trouble gaining traction, but it's not impossible. Samsung was once known for making crappy, low-end phones and cheap TVs. Now they're seen as a top TV and smartphone brand."'"

The big names were a no-show...

[PantherSE]

because they're big enough brands to have a show of their own. Why spend the money on an event where you have to fight for attention when you've established your brand enough that the media clamors to be invited to your event?

Re:Nope

[mspohr]

Not sure about your denominator, there, but you can buy voice and data plans for about $30 a month. This is $720 over 2 years.
It you buy a "top of the line" phone, it will cost you about the same as the service for 2 years (i.e. 50% of ownership cost). If you can get a cheap smartphone, it lowers your costs substantially.
Just about all Android and Apple smart phones have roughly the same functionality.

Re:I own a ZTE v875

[miknix]

I own a ZTE v875, which I got for around 80 euros as a carrier exclusive (TMN Smart A7). The phone is really really good for the value, in fact, I would get it again if something happens to it. It has everything what you would expect from a good Android phone. The GPS is even better, I often get more precision from the location services than my friends with higher end phones. The qwerty keyboard is awesome and the main reason why I bought this phone. There is a minor problem though, you need to use a plastic plug in the headphones jack, otherwise sand and dust comes in and stays between the touchscreen and the LCD - annoying. Other than that, the phone is very serviceable, I already opened it a couple of times to clean the sand / dust. In fact, I even managed to accidentally cut 5 of the LCD flex cable vias while trying to unplug it. Fortunately I have steady hands and a good soldering iron :)
Other than that, I'm stuck with gingerbread. The internal storage is quite small, however I have root access which allows me to move apps around to circumvent the small internal (permanent) memory. The battery autonomy is ok, with 3G on at all times I always have more than 1 day of battery.... if I dont abuse google maps.

Re:And they will not establish a foothold.

[Alex Zepeda]

Yeah, we use ZTE modems (embedded stuff) at work. It's a tossup between the support and the product as to which is actually worse. None of our vendors enjoy selling ZTE products. Our standard policy is to ship the modems from the vendor to ZTE to ensure proper configuration. We've had one batch that was provisioned for a Chinese telecom, so we ended up "roaming" on our carrier and were assigned IP addresses owned by a Chinese company. All of the ZTE documentation for this particular modem is for the latest version of the firmware (which is not backwards compatible with the previous version of the firmware). Well, despite sending all of these things back to ZTE, only a handful of the modems have the current, documented version of the firmware. Despite asking for documentation for the older version of the firmware, ZTE has refused to provide any. Their solution is to recall hundreds of modems, ship them to ZTE and hope for the best. The firmware is not user updatable.

No. Thanks.

I feel for any carrier that things hawking ZTE phones will be a reasonable experience.

Re:Enjoying arguing with your straw-man?

[bmo]

I've seen nobody say "China can never make quality hardware."

Oh look.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3376583&cid=42562759 [slashdot.org]

Even modded insightful.

--
BMO

ZTE Nubia-Z5

[gitano_dbs]

They are not only cheap models, ZTE its releasing this http://www.phonearena.com/phones/ZTE-Nubia-Z5_id7609 [phonearena.com] this month. Quadcore processor at 1500 MHz, 5 inches display on 1920 x 1080 pixels and 441 ppi.