Review of an iPhone knock-off

Review of an iPhone knock-off A provocative, racist and quite frankly completely wrong interface about a devilish device of doom! ”I like it!” Person ”I don’t like it.” Other person 47093 Written by Emile Nijssen (tweakers.net ID: ssj3gohan). http://www.enijssen.com Thanks to Redevice.nl for supplying me with a reviewing model 1 Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 No cigar At the end of last year, Apple had another marketing success. Although rumors were around for almost a year already (comparable to Google’s Android), it still came as a surprise for some that Apple could develop and build its own phone in such a short amount of time. The introduction was as always a symphony of marketing, fanboys and good planning (e.g. releasing a few independent reviews just hours after the official introduction). The iPhone was a success. The hype spread and quickly many of the more benevolent hype-dealers on sites like ebay started hauling in pallets of this new Apple toy, to sell them at hype-induced higher prices. Of course, with such a popular product, it’s nearly impossible to get even these third party sales channels saturated quickly enough to satisfy consumer demand, especially being the small company Apple still is (in market share). As opposed to benevolent dealers, of course there are lots of people who have a few in stock but won’t sell them for twice - even three times its wholesale price. But why sell the real thing? People will do anything to get their share of the Apple! It comes as no surprise that a few truly evil conmen eventually did turn up with bad reproductions of the iPhone (and sold it for considerable profits). But the phone we are talking about in this article is even one class further, or lower, as you will. After Apple itself, third party overpriced dealers and fakes-resellers, there is Satan himself, also known as The T-Phone 2 1.2 Opening the package Like Apple’s counterpart, packaging is very simple inasmuch that maybe this phone even has an edge over Apple’s real iPhone. It comes with no packaging at all! Truly well thought-out. It has always been a strong aspect in Apple’s sales strategy to provide the end user with a product that he or she simply has to unpack, plug in and turn on to use. Our good friends from China even managed to remove two out of the three steps out of this bothersome strategy and provided us with something that is truly readyto-use. This also seems to comply with China’s recent efforts to use more environmentally friendly methods of production, packaging and shipping as it saves on fuel and material. The phone comes with an extra battery and a USB charge/data cable. One cannot really say the telephone has faired well through the google translation service. That is, I can only assume this phone’s whole two hours of R&D have been to find three specifications of the iPhone (that is: that it is a phone and it is made by Apple, and that it has a touchscreen). After that, a generic telephone has been given the usual iPod-treatment, a defective touchscreen was slammed in (yes, defective and slammed) and whatever software they had lying around that resembled phone software was botted through Google Translate and copied onto the built-in flash. Truly ’think different’ (quoted from the startup animation)*. * Whereby different does not necessarily mean better, worse or anything at all 1.3 1.3.1 Overview Qualitative overview With no documentation, drivers, or anything else to start with it’s a true adventure to find any specifications at all. General specifications are what you’ll have to do with. First of all, it’s got a, what seems like, somewhere near QQVGA TFT TN Touchscreen with horrible characteristics. I say this because many reviews tend to use superfluous positive adjectives when reviewing their favourite brand (albeit Apple, Gigabyte or Antec). Because the sole virtue of this telephone is that it is an iPhone gone horribly wrong, I’d like to use superfluous negative adjectives. So, back to the horrible screen. It is nearly unviewable in bright daylight, yielding less than 60 cd/m2 (which is a figure I very scientifically came up with, with devices). Viewing angles are absent, having to view the screen from dead on. Ten or twenty degrees off-center is still doable, but thirty is a definite no-go. It’s a touchscreen though, which has definite 3 advantages. For instance, you can slam the phone on some surface and it actually responds by saying ’whhieuw’. Because that is the sound it makes when you do anything. Whhieuw. This is its second important feature: it makes sound. Lots of it. At first I thought this was a cool feature. After all, the big virtue of the iPhone itself is that it responds to every and any user input directly, without delay, with something intuitive. This must have been on top of the list of the designers of this phone, because it certainly responds to every and any user input. It also responds to no input. By default, it alerts the user every hour that an hour has passed, and does so by something many people would characterize as Jpop meets Duran Duran, for about half a minute. Every button you touch comes with a ’whhieuw’ which is soothing to the ear, would it have been 20 dB less loud. Figure 1.1: It is quite photogenic from a distance After having played around with the phone for about half an hour, eventually trusting it enough to let it eat my SIM-card, I found out that there was actually a menu with settings that allowed me to change this into no sound at all. This is bad news folks, as this phone has now become that much more phone and that much less laughing stock. 1.3.2 Boring figures It comes with a seesaw-type volume button on the left side, a 2.5mm headphone jack on the right, USB charging&data connector in the bottom (and the stylus pops out there, too) and a phone and battery + SIM compartment on the backside. Sound is generated by a displacement-type speaker in the back (next to the 2.0 megapixel camera lens) and a piezoelectronic device just above the screen. The microphone resides in a small hole under the 7-key. The phone has the numeric pad in a slightly odd 90 degrees turned topology with 0 and special characters on the right instead of bottom. The buttons are non-receding with poor feedback but there’s an option to turn on keyboard feedback clicks (or whieeuws). Above the numpad there are three undesignated function keys and one escape key around a five-way iPod-style directional pad with a fake Apple logo on the enter-button. All buttons are illuminated Figure 1.2: Readability on an overcast day by a blue fiber optic LED for ten seconds after input, and the screen turns off after anywhere between 10 and 120 seconds. The touchscreen itself has five dedicated keys in the bottom. The touchscreen is of the resistive type, reacting to any touch event (doesn’t need to be capacitive or warm) and is held in place by the front bezel, which provides a nice rim around it which aids in scrolling and other such events. On the main screen the most important actions (camera, phone book, calling and menu) can be accessed by the directional pad with quite clear indications of which button to press. 4 Chapter 2 The T-phone in use 2.1 What is this ****? It is interesting to see into another culture. I myself have travelled a bit in my short lifetime, and on my university I have had a meet and greet with most international students, and without any exceptions this has always enriched my life in one way or another. This phone is no difference - it may be my best experience of the Chinese culture ever. As mentioned before, at its default setting, without a SIM-card, the phone boots up and is usable as a media player or network scanner (interestingly enough it does have gsm enabled). However, the settings menu is absent in this mode which means there is no way to calibrate the touch screen, turn on, off or change sounds or do other things that can make the experience that much less intense. The standard sounds it uses are all optimally calibrated to chinese public transportation use: as obnoxious and loud as possible. With peeing and crying children sitting next to you you need to be able to get feedback from the numpad and listen to your average J-pop, right? Aargh... Figure 2.1: Leci n’est pas une 2MP camera. 5 Inserting the SIM-card makes all the difference. Actually, I can say that the phone is pretty all-right with these sounds turned down and/or off - even an improvement compared to my ’old’ phone: half the height and 30 grams lighter. Well, if it weren’t for everything that makes the iPhone good. 2.2 What were you thinking? This is the third slightly annoyed and mocking title because that is the feeling you get from working with counterfeit material. The iPhone has a reasonable build quality, the iPhone has an interface that makes sense and it’s a fashionable thing to use. The T-Phone is everything but that. If you build something that should resemble the iPhone, well... Make it resemble the iPhone damnit! Just slamming on an Apple logo (of course slightly altered to evade lawsuits) doesn’t make something an Apple product, nobody’s fooled that easily. This is the deal: The screen is defective. This is related to both the screen and the build quality. Like many cheaper phones, the phone has as little soldered connections as possible and relies on the clips keeping the plastic container together for enough pressure to secure electrical connections between parts. But if you want to play that game, please, for the love of God, make sure that the plastic actually holds. One of the clips in the phone has failed (or never worked at all) and as a consequence on one side the casing separates just about one-tenth of a millimeter. However small this is, this makes the screen contacts bad and occasionally you’re greeted with low response time or the White Screen of Death - an undriven TFT screen. What do you expect from a counterfeit phone. A counterfeit phone costing e450..... Figure 2.2: The battery compartment also holds the SIM-card 2.2.1 It’s Chinese and you know it The interface is half Chinese. I know this interface - it’s also used on the CECT 3000 fake iphone and lots of other chinese brand phones. But there are very good English translations available for this OS, with normal Western typesetting. This is another point of pure neglect in the phone. The most annoying thing here is that in camera mode the only obvious way to save pictures is by giving them either the default date code name, or to enter a name in.... Quick Chinese... The interface is ridiculous in general. There’s a menu called ’Leisure’ (which is okay, but not the best translation ever) which has as a first entry ’Fantasy’. What Figure 2.3: Whoever thought of this name is the hell? Mobile club. Very descriptive... Vidicon? both legendary and.. well, Chinese probably 6 Gobang? It is still not clear to me whether the phone supports anything but GSM and what that would be. Clearly it is not HSDPA- or Edge-compatible but probably GPRS and WAP work (but I didn’t feel like blowing a few euros on proving that - the screen and processor are completely incompetent when it comes to rendering pda pages or email). There is certainly no option to turn anything off, even when the SIM-card is removed GSM is still on and bursts can be observed through any coil connected to a speaker. 2.3 Everyday functionality In the first week of use I didn’t really trust the phone, I expected it to fall apart at any moment. I’ve used it for about a month now; it’s kind of proven itself over the weeks to, strangly, have the quality of consistence. One of the key features is a largely inconveniently marked keypad. Where normal phones tend to have a five-way pad, pick up and hang up button, this phone has two additional control function buttons. Like in most phones, the dial button is on the left and the hang up-button is on the right but picking up is done by the bottom left button and hanging up by the top-right button. Granted, they’re perfectly opposite each other with respect to the five-way pad but not very intuitive nonetheless. I still make the mistake of pressing the escape button instead of hang up to hang up. I was talking about consistency and then explained an inconsistency - doesn’t seem quite logical. But whatever you do on the phone, you will quickly find out that the escape button always lets you exit to the main screen - wherever you are, this button will bring order to chaos. And that’s the big upside of the interface. Although not very western-like, you are always tempted to look around the options and various menus to see what happens. After all, the escape button consistently leads you back. Battery life is very poor and that’s the main problem I have with the phone. The hardware isn’t of great quality but it’s consistent and - I didn’t mention this yet - the software has never crashed on me. If it would only last more than five medium-length calls or three days standby I’d stay with it forever and ever (which in fake iphone language would probably be just under 25 talking hours). The bad battery life is caused by two very important hardware flaws: the first is the raised buttons: if you press the phone against any surface, including the inside of your pockets where it usually resides, a button will eventually be pressed and the phone wakes up its touchscreen yelling ’Please long press up key!’ which is chinese for ’... no, i’ll stop with the Figure 2.4: Connectors and miscellaneous buttons. 7 chinese jokes. Any serious phone has receded buttons with supports in between or at least support around to circumvent this problem. The second design flaw is the ridiculous amount of GSM checking and the ridiculous amount of transmission power. When the phone is near my speakers (and anybody ever holding their phone near speakers knows that the antenna’s bursts are very audible through the induction generated by the EM signal of the antenna) it can be observed that it consistently bursts every few seconds with full power. Usually, mobile phones only check every few seconds when having to go into roaming mode, and even then it checks in very short time intervals for a few seconds and then starts decreasing the frequency to save power, eventually dropping down to as low as once every 20-30 seconds if the signal integrity doesn’t fall. This phone clearly has no power savings mode GSM chip. 2.3.1 Getting to know it better The quality of the built-in webcam is quite interesting. It says it’s two megapixels and I can only imagine that is because the iPhone has an amount of pixels in that order of magnitude, but the actual pictures coming out of the phone are 320x240. At least, if you put 2 megapixels on the cover, do some mathematics and interpolate the pictures to 2 MP so you don’t get laughed at when... oh never mind :-). The pictures are of such abominal quality that I won’t even take the time to downA load them to this L TEXfile. Which is my next point. The phone has an impressive 100 MB of free flash memory - it’s actually 112 MB in total but about 10 MB gets eaten by the operating system (5.5 MB) and some sample pictures, completely wacky chinese sounds and music and more things that I can’t really seem to unravel. But unlike any other USB mass storage device, this Figure 2.5: It’s got a telescopic pen. Note the phone’s memory doesn’t allow the phone to be func- screen separated from the bezel that is suptional and memory accessible at the same time - you posed to keep everything snugly fixed. have to enter the Tool menu and activate the ’Disk on’ item after which the phone turns off and becomes available as MSD. Then comes the fun part: up- or downloading stuff. It takes ages. And by that I mean: I’ve tried to upload the latest album of Caribou and was greeted by a message stating it would take a bit over 100 hours to complete the transfer. I didn’t even know such slow flash and/or usb interface controllers were still being produced! Even my TI-83 plus has a higher peak bandwidth, and that’s a freaking pocket calculator! The next point: customizability. The phone can be customized to use any backdrop and any midi or midi ringtone for sms, mms and telephone. Any file can be chosen to do this. This is quite necessary, too, as the sounds the phone makes by default are extremely hello kitty. Just to know what it would be like if I were a socially underdeveloped Japanese school girl, I’ve been walking around with the phone ring tone (which is simply called ’ring’ in the menu) to some happy tune that lasts 90 seconds and my SMS ring tone to a clearly Chinese person yelling something that starts like ’HELLO!’ and ends in something that belongs more to ’RRRRRING!’. One final note on the sound: it’s bad in many ways. First of all, the headphone jack is 2.5mm which makes it unfit for most normal (read: possessing some quality) headphones like my favourite Sennheisers. Because I already have a PDA with that defect and I constructed a fix for that I don’t really mind. What’s really annoying is that the sound is not even remotely near audible quality through the headphones. The low cut-off is horrible (anything lower than -10 dB or something near that is cut off to -infinity dB so any detail is instantly lost) and although one can expect the quality of the larger speaker 8 to be questionable (somewhere near what you always tend to hear the white trash people playing on their knockoff phones in the back of public transportation) this is probably not quality limited by the speaker but by the DAC. 2.4 Conclusion Despite its defective and weird nature, it’s still a pretty useful phone. I’ve had numerous fake and counterfeit things in the past, like a fake adidas (it actually said ’abiods’ under the inverted logo, which isn’t even phonetically similar to adidas except for the first vowel), and all of these more or less gave up after one or two weeks. I’ve had the opportunity to test the T-phone for about a month now and it still works. It hasn’t crashed - ever. It’s got really poor battery time but it’s had that since the beginning. The screen is defective but that’s also something it’s always had. Whatever I do to the phone, it may not react logically but it reacts consistently. This is really the only quality I expect from an electronic device - to be consistent in what it does. A good analogy is the Motorola F3 - possibly the worst phone interface ever. But if you know what to do it always does what you mean to do, which makes most people who use it pretty positive about the phone. Obviously paying 450 euros for a defective fake is ridiculous (although I got to test it for free) but in the end I don’t mind using it as a phone. Yes, I had indeed expected a completely different conclusion from ”I don’t mind using it as a phone”, but hey, that’s the verdict! Special thanks to my good friends at Redevice.nl for supplying me with a reviewing model 9