Curious what a 2024 update would be to this article, 15 years later. Is the shanzai movement still in full force? Has it gotten larger? Smaller? Is it just not a thing anymore? Have former shanzai groups gone on to become larger, successful companies (and thus can't be called shanzai anymore)?
Admittedly I don't know anything about this beyond OP's 15-year-old blog post.
Scrub to 01:54. That's a table of the flagship smartphones at that time. The last column of the table is the price in CNY. 3k, 4k, 5k -- around that range.
Now scrub to 03:20 where their CEO announced the MSRP. Listen to that 30-second-long "wow". Look at that price. The astonishment was real.
That's the price range of Shanzhai smartphones.
On a flagship-spec'd smartphone.
That's monumental in the history of smartphone evolution in China. Ask any friend of yours born & raised in mainland China. I bet none would argue otherwise.
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Disclaimer: I moved to the US in 2017, and my experience since then with tech trends in China has been scarce.
The Shanzhai movement was also mostly based on pirated WinCE and the MediaTek all in one chip. After that became outdated (Android replaced WinCE, MediaTek lots its commodity advantage), they really didn't have much of a chance (I don't remember seeing many Android Shanzhai phones, but then I wasn't really paying attention back then).
A lot of the design team (almost all Chinese) I worked with at Microsoft China 07-09 moved over to Xiaomi to help found their UX design team (I see one is now a UX director at xiaomi, he was an intern in 2007), which I found pretty cool. They had previously done a lot of Windows Mobile work, and were really committed to trying out some of their wilder designs.
Oh yes, thanks for bringing up the pre-Android-era Shanzhai phones. Were they on WinCE? I was too young to get my hands on one for any first-hand experience.
They were almost all on pirated WinCE, not even windows mobile. It might have been all pirated WinCE, but an open sourced Android obviously killed all of that (circa 2010? I don’t remember exact dates but I had a friend working as an engineering manager on the Kin team who talked about it a lot at lunch).
Would you be able to spare some time and find us some references here? Despite a native Chinese speaker, I can't seem to gather up the correct terms on baidu.com
google.com to get me relevant materials on that pre-Android-era mobile OSes.
I’m pretty sure it’s Windows CE and not WinMo, most reviewers weren’t concerned about the difference. WinCE was the core of WinMo (well, until windows phone), but it was easier to just take winCE and skin it since they didn’t really want the WinMo UI (this phone has an iPhone copycat UX).
Pirated WinCE?? Do you have any source that those MediaTek software were CE based? I thought they were something more primitive, something like FreeRTOS.
> Part of the reason for this is the low investment in new technology by Shanzhai phone makers and their dependence on cheap and freely available chipsets from companies like MediaTek and Huawei running pirated operating systems, like Windows Mobile. Industry analysts believe the near future won't deliver a dramatic improvement of the usability of the pirate phones.
There really was no other option before android came out, since Symbian was never pirated (I think).
I think something must have been lost in translation then, most Shanzhai phones were heavily modified and skinned featurephones, not smartphones.
If that was understanding within MS China, I wonder whether that had an impact on MS' strategic decisions - whether they thought CE/WM has great market penetration in China and required changes from existing platform to WP is minimal...
I’m not sure what a heavily skinned feature phone OS would have been at the time, maybe Symbian. It was easier to take the mediatek chip and throw WinCE on whatever, even if you didn’t add many smart phone features.
It definitely made for a lot of jokes, but I don’t think the executives, at least on the MS china side where I was working, took it as a good omen at all. These were junk phones, and the iPhone at the time clearly wasn’t junk. That WinMo was shortly thereafter abandoned makes me think Redmond thought so as well.
Microsoft also locked down WP, so it wasn’t pirate-able, and since Android was already out a couple of years later when Wp was done and was basically free (no need to pirate!), well, everyone lost interest in whatever Microsoft was doing with mobile.
I believe it was some MediaTek demo code that could run directly on the modem for a 1-chip GSM featurephone or in a AP+BP 2-chip 3G configuration. Wasn't Symbian, nor CE nor Linux, more like a giant Arduino sketch. There were a lot more giant Arduino sketches / baremetal library-based big main loop RTOS in the '00s.
The 2009 article discussed here links to a PDF which is in Chinese and doesn’t seem to go into the software side much, but on page 20 you can see a device that appears to be running Windows CE. The Windows logo is visible on screen.
I didn't grow up in China, but had a Redmi 3 several years ago and can attest that the price was just too good to beat. Unlike the phone I bought in China back in 2011, the Redmi had a nice UI and felt like the closest thing to an iPhone of any Android I'd used at that point.
Well from here in Hong Kong, it still seems well alive: we still see improving knock-offs year on year of US-designed stuff, I got the habit to go to stores, take a pic, get it auto detected in Taobao and pay 10% of the brand price for an exact copy from Shenzhen that seems to work just as well, not question asked.
What I love is how we can get iphones or other apple stuff repaired within the hour for 10 USD at random street shops, sometimes a small walk away from flagship Apple stores that charge hundreds of dollars for someth that doesnt seem to be sourced differently or at least works just as well.
I dont know how people can live in trademark-enforcing countries now. But maybe it wouldnt scale if no design could be profitable middle-term ?
As a side note, I got a huawei phone recently and I couldnt believe how good it was compared to an iphone: it last longer, it has way more features that even Android takes time to copy back and it looks very premium. I got some friends almost envious until I confess all the hoops I had to go through to get Google stuff working: that stung.
It's a shame because we still don't have innovations like TV tuners, am/fm (my LG L70 had an FM-only tuner), or pseudo 7.1 surround sound. Well, we do have surround plugins for Android, but they require root and installing an Xposed module.
Shanzhai AirPods Pro copies the look from Apple, has working noise cancellation, and even has a pop-up pairing window on iPhone, and all those cost less than 200 CNY (30 USD).
It used to be a popular choice among people who want AirPods-like earphones, and some may use it for fraud (it looks identical to an authentic one).
Admittedly I don't know anything about this beyond OP's 15-year-old blog post.