Buying a smartphone in China: Agony and Ecstasy
My new phone will be amazing.
My new phone will change my life.
My new phone will be my newest and closest friend.
My new phone is killing me, and I don’t even have it yet.
I broke my last closest and and bestest buddy on the 13th of June. It wasn’t an accident, at the time, so I’m told. More of a fit of Chinese whiskey-fueled gesticulation. The result was that the screen of my Samsung Note 3 was smashed to stained-glass glory, the digitizer underneath was vanquished, and no light ever shone forth from it again.
This means I have been 122 days without a phone.
122 days.
This ends tomorrow. Maybe. I’ve decided on this, and redecided, multiple times, even while writing the preceding 100~ words. I have not been without a device in that time, because I am a digital addict and do not have the willpower to fill my spare moments without ebooks or podcasts or Facebook news crawls with more “productive” pursuits.
I have been using an Onda V820w Win/Droid Chinese tablet, a creaking slab of plasticised digital consumption. It was the best 500 RMB I’ve spent. I’ve reads dozens of books on it’s inconsistently-lit screen, and barely heard hundreds of hours of podcast audio through its back-firing toy gramaphone of a speaker. It’s like a three-legged mongrel dog, and I love it dearly.
Recently though its started behaving badly. If it were more like that dog, it would be wetting the carpet, while there’s a perfectly good litterbox right next to it, and I know damn well it’s housetrained. Poor little Ondie’s losing wi-fi signal. Even standing right next to an admittedly inadequate and woeful router box (one antennae, one! I mean have you seen that 8-legged Asus spider router that secretly steals your beta waves as you sleep?) I’m getting no bars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_wave — Because interesting.
In a tablet, a non-cellular tablet, not getting wi-fi signal is kind of like losing bladder control. It’s just… not very endearing. So my gradual plans for smartphone acquisition got moved up a bit. I’m not excited at the thought of a trip to Hong Kong next week occurring without even the wi-fi of my sole communications device working, and being stranded somewhere along the Chinese coast, hunkered down from a typhoon in an airport storm shelter in some city of 15 million inhabitants that I’d never heard the name of before. Or similar. So, get a phone, something I’ve been wanting to do for at least the last 122 days, and have been doing dozens of hours of research on, in the next few days. Easy. Don’t panic. Just breath.
Here’s a top 25 list of cheap Chinese phones. I’ll give you three days to decide. I’m serious. I’d love to take a poll. Although that would be just another vector to inevitably regret my ultimate decision. There’s so many choices here it’s been a great illustration for the theory on consumer behaviour that goes, the more options you have, the less satisfied you’ll be with your choice.
I tried to ask myself what I really wanted in a phone. Here’s how that went.
- 1,000 RMB — 250 NZD— 150 USD — 100 GBP or less.
- Android 5.0 at minimum. After being stuck on 4.4 on my Note 3, and god knows what on my tablet, is 0.2 a thing? I want some Material in my life.
- Fingerprint sensor, because that’s cool, and I told myself I’d actually use phone payments in the UK when I move next year.
- NFC — for said payments.
- A battery that lasts longer than one half of ten minutes. Ondie doesn’t have much stamina. My Note 3 was a goddamn Energizer bunny, and when he dropped I had a spare battery just waiting in a charging cradle for that bad boy.
That’s it. And wouldn’t you know it, I found just about 50 phones that matched just about that. Just about. What about an unlocked bootloader though? What the hell are you talking about? — you may ask. Well, if you haven’t had the pleasure of using Chinese electronics — ha, just think about the impossibility of you, reading this, not having done so — in-country, then you may have no idea of the true meaning of bloatware. Buggy UI’s, gratuitous Android skins, bloatware, unavailability of Google Apps, bloatware, theme stores from the OEM that must be equal in revenue to what must be their tiny hardware margin, bloatware. So at least the possibility of alternative ROM’s for these devices is vital information, and for that info it requires a deepdive into Chinglish forums that gives me PTSD flashbacks to that morning’s kindergarten tour of duty. And that’s for every device.
Then there’s bands and reception frequencies, cross-checking for UK carriers spectrum. Not getting into it. Just saying, that’s a thing.
There’s been frontrunners, that leap out at me with their low-price, surprisingly good “not shit” build quality, and features that I ridiculously self-justify as future proof. Oh look, here’s one.
This one’s not an iPhone. Says so right on the back. Maybe a cousin. If it weren’t for the fact we know Tim Cook hasn’t been siring illegitimate offspring among Apple’s production lines it might even be a half-sibling. InFocus has been a projector marque. Now though, they roll off the same lines as the iPhone. Because Foxconn, the power behind the throne. This thing looks good, has the specs, but can’t be had in-store in my quaint urban conurbation of a baker’s dozen of millions, and at four months old is getting a little long in the tooth. Seriously.
Oh and what’s this I spy coming over the horizon? Is it another iPhone-inspired iDroid? Nope. This is a precocious newcomer, talking smack and taking names, and even hammering nails.
You can’t get much future-proof then a phone you can hammer nails with. Because when the future apocalypse comes that even Bored Elon Musk himself says is inevitable and all these iChumps are hoarding their rose-gold surfboard shaped bullion in their basements, this phone will be hammering the nails of the rising Mad Maxian New World Order, powered by Indian IT dudes.
Never heard of UMi, neither have you, don’t pretend. So was leery of taking a risk. How their selling fingerprint ID-toting, USB-C, nigh indestructable boot unlocked phones for the price gap between iPhone models reeks of dark magicks to me. I wanted in on that. I’ve seriously drooled over this phone on nights. You can ask my fiance to check my pillow. Not sure how she’d respond honestly, because that’s a pretty weird request. In the end, this phone was too new, online ordering was needed, and not enough reviews had come out for me to really guage it. I like the bezel-less sides, the curved glass screen, the overall design other than a certain thickness it seems to have, but really it was a lack of people saying anything negative, and thus in my mind balanced, about this phone that steered me away.
So here it is, my new phone as of tomorrow. Or the next day. Or never.
Anticlimactic? Yep. Uninspired? Sure. Imbecilic? Whoa there. Right on my 1K price point, I’m getting a four month old phone from a company that’s launched 12 models this year to date, and abandoned the older models cold. This one’s rumoured to be getting an update soon as well, oh happy day. Same specs as the rest, but ‘unapologetically plastic’. Meizu is a well-known name, it’s got that going for it. You’re probably all nodding right now and thinking ‘good ol’ Meizu, that Chinese company famous for… A really stupid logo’. But, authentic retail presence in my town! Listing on GSMArena! A UI Western reviewers have been heard to call ‘less than horrendous’! This is as good as it gets, guys.
Assuming I can get the correct sub-model, maybe an ambitious assumption that depends greatly on the English level of the store staff at the time of my visit, and their honesty in answering my technical and potentially difficult question, this phone will work in the UK. If all goes well, I will be proud owner of a phone one could call extremely plastic, with a screen I’ve read that is much, much poorer in sunlight than it’s predecessor, and that will require the following of obscure Internet teachings to unlock it’s inner root, to disable the dreaded bloat, and install the sacred GApps. But then life shall be good again. 3G and 4G will rain down from the heavens, and instead of slipping through my hands while my dumb three-legged Ondie looks on in glassy-eyed silence, I will catch them on my 5.5 inch glassy rectangular umbrella, and I will hurl my tweets back into the uncaring Chinese sky.
God I miss having a phone. Having an 8 inch tablet in your pants make people think you’re a little over-excited to see them, and I hate to be a disappointment.
