Quality fake electronics

[Glass]

I'm only posting this because I'm amazed. I've just had a recent experience with fake electronics coming from what I assume is China. I've had a lot of experiences out of asia. Buying fakery watches, clothes and so on

Now this experience did not involve getting stung, but getting my hands on a couple smart phones that are such good copies it is very hard to convince yourself they really are fake. Both are extremely good and one of them is so good it's amazing that it's not a genuine unit.

Both units are samsung galaxy phones. A version 3 and 4. The 3 is the lesser convincing one but only just. I really need to compare it to a genuine one to confirm some of these clues that give it away.
slightly loose cover in places
fake batteries
low quality cameras - maybe 2mpx but not HD.
less or lower cpu's - needs confirming
special custom android builds
toughness of the glass - needs watching as genuine use tough gorilla glass
noisy rough haptive feedback - thats the vibration feedback
there are no/few manufacturer apps on the devices (although between 3 and 4 they addressed this a bit.)
some loaded apps look a bit dodgy for a "new" phone

One of the phones had 3 photos on it. New in box and it's got 3 photos of some dodgy dudes sitting around a table.

There is obvious stuff such as batteries that look fake but again are very convincing. The accessories gives it away. Generic power adapter and headphones instead of branded. Because of where this was bought you could see how people would not be bothered by that. Tourists would be told they need another adapter for their home country.

Doing a bit of online research you can discover other things to look for such as packaging. The packaging is also convincing but it seems some boxes are copied from the packages of tablet products. If you knew that phone style box and tablet style were different colours you would be ok. The boxes have all the right codes, logo's, layouts, bar codes, Ce's everything. Usually smaller/tighter packaging. Amazingly convincing.

Fake Silver coins are mentioned here a fair bit and you can see the quality varies. Some are just sloppy or they lack top notch machinery to make them. Then thereare the good ones. These phones are very good. I guess when I think about watches I recall those were pretty good efforts as well. I have a collection, some are over 20 years old and they still work. Stopped watching the time many years ago now.

I haven't connected them up to the phone network or wifi so don't know how they operate as actual phones. I don't trust them to hook them to any networks I am on. I'll make an isolated network just for them and see what happens.

I've got some benchmarking tools I will run on them and hopefully can identify what these devices are actually packing for hardware.
Should be interesting.

[Cebu_4_2]

Excellent detective work boss!

[Glass]

I'm still amazed by these devices.

Here is a video on YT. This is the exact same phone. approx 10 minutes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3xd56FMrLs

Digging around I discovered these are made by Media Tek and the devices are coded MKT-658X where X could be a 9 or some other number.

Here is where you can buy them un branded for just over $100
http://www.pandawill.com/i9500-smartphone-android-42-mtk6589-quad-core-50-inchhd-screen-1g-ram-130mp-camera-white-p75876.html

WARNING. I didn't detect anything on the pandawill web site but you should proceed with caution if you visit... dodgy products and so on.

I think this is the official unofficial android device supplier.

These devices are cheap and convincing in appearance. You could do all sorts of nefarious things with them. They could be used as drop bots or trojans or what ever they call them. Set it up with remote access, plug it into the back of a PC or charger in an office, tucked away under a desk out of sight.

[vacuum]

One thing the chinese do sometimes is continue to keep the production line running after they have already sold the requested amount to the company they're making them for. Its basicall like printing money because most electronics are sold at 40%- 60% margin to pay for the product development, etc. Big companies like apple can take measures to stop this, like owning the factory themselves or only giving them a certain number of special encrypted chips which without them will make the product not work.

But when you have the board files, mechanical molds, firmware, assembly instructions, etc, you don't have to make fakes. You can simply make the real thing, with a few measures to cut the cost down even more and sell them at a modest margin. Easy money.

Another thing is that these places have their own engineering teams and reference platforms that they use to do offshore device engineering services, where companies give them the specs and they make the device and the company that paid them qualifies it and slaps their logo on it. After they have the experience of building one such device for a customer, how hard is it to build their own version of a similar device?

[Glass]

yes I think you are right to some degree. A factory might only run 2 shifts a day but actually a 3rd shift runs where everything produced goes out another door at the factory.

While these phones look almost perfect from the outside and a casual user would probably not know enough to work out the operating software might be a hacked up version, sonmeone who has a real one would be able to pick the difference. The main difference is that the internals are not Samsungs specification. Not even same CPU. So opening up the phone gives a stronger clue that something is not right but it is still not crystal clear from that.

The quality is probably 80%+ of the real thing, but some internal finish and fit is untidy in places. There are even some thin pieces of card laid out over portions of the internals. These are hiding either another product brand name or some particularly poor finish. When I get a bit of time I'll pull those off and take a closer look.

This unit is not using current generation tech but is definately using up older generation tech that is either laying around as it failed quality control or was over produced.

[Ponce]

Glass, I went to the link for tha site and right before my eyes the price went from $99.00 to $199.00.

V

[gunDriller]

i'll be getting a new phone in a month or 2.

i was thinking a Samsung smartphone with Straight-talk coverage, $45 a month, about $120-$150 for the phone.

i wonder if Great Value Samsung smart-phones are the real deal, or fake ?

[Glass]

Glass, I went to the link for tha site and right before my eyes the price went from $99.00 to $199.00.

V

See, the internet knows who has the money. Although it might have been changing currency from Euro to USD? I have noticed that some parts of asia are pricing in Euros now and not USD. Thats on the street pricing at any rate.


i'll be getting a new phone in a month or 2.

i was thinking a Samsung smartphone with Straight-talk coverage, $45 a month, about $120-$150 for the phone.

i wonder if Great Value Samsung smart-phones are the real deal, or fake ?

I was wondering about the BamaPhone deal. Maybe I could get the supply contract to supply everyone in Clever-land with a SmartBama phone. heyheyhey hey, it's smarter than the average Bama.

I think the Sammy is a good phone from my experience so hopefully you'll get the real deal.