Smartphones are some of the hottest hi tech gadgets in the mobile communications market and has accounted for 25% of sales in the US mobile phone market according to market experts like Nielsen and Gartner. Forecasts of upcoming market trends will see smartphones getting a larger piece of the mobile phone pie with over 2.5 billion in sales expected within the period from 2010 to 2015.
Aside from that, other expert predictions also suggest that smartphones will become primary vehicles for people in accessing the Internet and may eventually exceed the sales of personal computers by the year 2012. These gadgets like Apple’s iPhone sells between $99 and $299 depending on the memory capacity while their Android counterparts have price tags between the $149 and $199 range.
But these marquee smartphone brands are not the only ones getting bigger slices of the market as Chinese shanzhai phones are emerging with incredibly low prices compared to their branded counterparts. With better components emerging such as the latest MTK chips that go into the heart and soul of these shanzhai phones, a new revolution in the tech world is soon to take place.
An Overview of Chinese Shanzhai Phones
There are two literal meanings to the term “shanzhai” in Chinese. One is that it can refer to the stockades that bandits and warlords have in the mountains and are beyond official control. Another is that it can also refer to lookalikes, low-quality, improved goods, or things done in parody.
In the tech world, shanzhai refers to the imitation, knockoffs or cloned versions of electronic devices https://www.hugtechs.com/ such as mobile phones. Small companies in China who makes these shanzhai phones shamelessly copy the designs of branded manufacturers such as Apple and Nokia. They would then create knockoffs of these tech products and sell them really cheaply to online resellers while carrying strange variations in the names such as Nokla N97, Hi-Phone or Motololah.
Powered by MTK Chips
Early versions of Shanzhai phones are non-smartphones and makes use of chips coming from MediaTek or MTK. This made it possible for Shanzhai manufacturers to sell their products at really cheap prices that no marquee mobile phone manufacturer can match. MediaTek is a fabless semiconductor company that makes electronic components and chips that go into mobile phones and wireless devices such as the MTK6516 that powers most non-smart Shanzhai phones.
However, when smartphones captured the market by storm, MTK was slow in coming out with chips that would power the Shanzhai smartphone. MTK made a comeback when it launched its Android-enabled chipset that sent Chinese manufacturers coming up with their own versions of the smartphone but at price tags that are in the $100 range more or less. These smartphones and related mobile device products carrying MTK chips are paving the way for affordable high tech gadgets to be available to consumers who cannot afford the high-end versions.
