China's Top Phone Makers Huawei and Xiaomi In Talks With Carriers To Expand To US Market (bloomberg.com) 44
From a report: Huawei and Xiaomi are in talks with U.S. wireless operators about selling flagship smartphones to American consumers as soon as next year, according to people familiar with the matter. The handset makers are negotiating with carriers including AT&T and Verizon, said the people, asking not to be identified because the matter is private. Talks are still fluid and it's possible no agreements will materialize, they said.
AT&T and Huawei (Score:2)
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Just what we need (Score:1, Insightful)
More cheap crap from inherently dishonest people, who will load up the phones with malware to spy on us and report back to Beijing. The US should ban the import of these phones.
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Dunno about you, but Huawei phone have been pretty good in terms of bang for buck performance with minimal software bloat and decent user serviceability. I don't doubt there might be spyware on them, but when has that stopped people from using good hardware? People still buy Lenovo/HP products by the score, and stuff like Google Assistant is lauded by tech news as some great advancement despite being openly spyware-oriented.
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It's pretty silly to say this and then exclude companies like Samsung, Apple, LG, HTC, etc from the same logic.
Xiaomi also makes some very high-end phones that are highly reviewed. Definitely not "cheap crap." Huawei? /shrug
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It was a xenophobic comment, suggesting that Chinese folks sell snake-oil while twirling their fumanchu and thumbing the scale because, well, that's what the Chinese do. No substance behind it, just some idiotic ranting from racist assholes.
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Have you ever been to China?
Have you ever had to deal with Chinese businesses?
Your comment is as ignorant as any I have ever read.
Re: Just what we need (Score:1)
But, they are still more trustworthy than Google.
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who will load up the phones with malware to spy on us and report back to Beijing.
As opposed to other phones which have the Facebook app pre-installed? Or Google's Gapps suite?
Chinese Spy Phones (Score:5, Insightful)
At very affordable prices.
Kaspersky all over again (Score:1, Flamebait)
Just my thoughts too. THe Kaspersky [nytimes.com] thing may happen again. Heck, the ongoing farce of "Russia collusion" may, bucking the proverbial trend, come back as a real tragedy next time — because Chinese, generally, have their excrement together [thetimes.co.uk] much more than Russians these days.
Re:Kaspersky all over again (Score:5, Insightful)
There is still no proof about whether Kaspersky is actually leaking anything to the Russian government. Of course the US federal government doesn't want to use their products, which makes total sense because it is too much of a risk, but nothing, to my knowledge, has been proven.
Same for Chinese. You may consider the risk of using a Chinese phone, but so far neither Huawei nor Xiaomi have been caught selling data to their government. Even when some data was leaked to servers in China, it was never clear there was a political intent (opposed to just plain incompetence from the Chinese developers).
This kind of leaks go hardly unnoticed. You can't easily plant them without getting caught and if you do, the risks would be big. The most successful so far have been Google and Amazon, since no one could know if the US agencies had access to all the requests done through Alexa/Google assistant.
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Sadly the reality is most people in the world trust the Russian government and the Government of China more than the US government, which has factually proven over and over and over again it absolutely can not be trusted. Quite simply have something they want and you wont sell it to them at a sharp discount they will kill you for it, whether that you is one person or a million people. Who gives a fuck who the US government trusts, no one, absolutely no one, not even US citizens, should trust it, corrupt as
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The only thing we know for sure about Russia is that they came in and defeated ISIS, while we were talking about how cool moderate rebels were and making Oscar Propaganda about White Hats.
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If letting the Chinese spy on me gets me a phone at half the local cost, I'm OK with that.
Once I have an always-on, location-aware device on my person, somebody's tracking it. The Chinese are less likely to do anything with whatever information they gather on me, AND they're not in the same country. Or on the same continent.
Then there's the fact that the particular phone I have has been torn down, and the software disassembled by 'reputable hackers'... and only the usual adware crap was found, which you c
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the reality is they probably just exchange data. definitely gets around those pesky rules about spying on american citizens, amirite?
Re: Chinese Spy Phones (Score:2)
Would love to see Xiaomi phones here (Score:4, Interesting)
They do with the Mi Mix 2! (Score:2)
I had a Xiaomi Mi5 which was a great phone, at a very low price compared to the competition, with the only problem being that it would not work with T-mobile and I visit the US now and then, so it was annoying.
Enter the Xiaomi Mi Mix 2 - their first device to support T-mobile LTE, and an amazing phone with a gorgeous 6" screen at a device size that is a little smaller than the 5.5" iPhone pluses. It is becoming very popular outside the US, in fact there is a fleet of copycat chinese manufacturers that are m
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Because there's clear demand for them in the states. Hell, if you read enough ArsTech or Endgadget, you'll see a myriad of glowing reviews for Huawei/Xioami phones appended with "Not For Sale In US", with comment sections wishing the phones would come stateside.
The phone market is not as saturated as it seems, since there's not much in the way of a middle ground these days. On the one hand, there are a plethora of cheap devices (mostly just downgrade versions of flagships), on the other there are a bunch of
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From a consumer point of view, the US cell phone market is virtually vacant rather than "saturated." Yes, there's a lot of crap (both cheap and expensive) available, but if you're not into crap, you're probably having to buy some semi-obscure brands, possibly imported. The companies who used to make phones that people liked (e.g. Samsung, Apple), don't even try anymore, having completely g
Confused ... didn't FOXCONN do this? (Score:1)
Increased duty? (Score:4, Informative)
If China is planning to increase duty on foreign branded phones, surely the US should be doing the same for Chinese branded phones and for the same percentages? I don't believe in unfair market protections, so if the another country is applying duties, surely the same tariffs should be applied in the other direction?
xiaomi (Score:1)
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CDMA problem (Score:2)
Let me help (Score:1)
Love it! (Score:1)
Finally, the Chinese have figured out what we want (Score:2)
You see, the American consumers are really strange. They don't enjoy owning unlocked smartphones that are free of carrier bloat. They want a smartphone that's locked to one carrier, features carrier logo on the back and on the boot screen, and has dozens of carrier apps and services installed on the phones. Neither consumers like having phones with many radio bands. We want the phone to have the absolute minimum of radio bands to make it work with one carrier, so that the phone becomes crippled when you try