Tech Trend: Shanzhai (2009)(bunniestudios.com)
bunniestudios.com
Tech Trend: Shanzhai (2009)
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284
42 comments
Mainland-born Chinese here.
Xiaomi basically killed Shanzhai smartphones (the sector of all Shanzhai techs chosen by the OP) by releasing Xiaomi (and later Redmi) smartphones.
Xiaomi made Android smartphones affordable. How affordable? Here's a clip of the debut event of Xiaomi's first smartphone back in 2011:
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Xx411v7XX/
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.
Xiaomi basically killed Shanzhai smartphones (the sector of all Shanzhai techs chosen by the OP) by releasing Xiaomi (and later Redmi) smartphones.
Xiaomi made Android smartphones affordable. How affordable? Here's a clip of the debut event of Xiaomi's first smartphone back in 2011:
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Xx411v7XX/
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.
---
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 After that became outdated (Android replaced WinCE, MediaTek lots its commodity advantage), they really didn't have much of a chance (I don't remember seeing many Android Shanzhai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.
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... creative!
They were... creative!
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.
See the comment cousin of yours. I didn’t find much, and what I did find was mostly stuck in PDFs.
Edit: here is one article discussing a specific Shanzhai phone. https://drprem.com/tech/cect-t32-apple-cant-approve-this-clo...
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).
Here is another one with WinCE listed as the OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meizu_M8
Edit: here is one article discussing a specific Shanzhai phone. https://drprem.com/tech/cect-t32-apple-cant-approve-this-clo...
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).
Here is another one with WinCE listed as the OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meizu_M8
Learning everyday!
Pirated WinCE?? Do you have any source that those MediaTek software were CE based? I thought they were something more primitive, something like FreeRTOS.
Just that I heard at the time when I was working at Microsoft in China. You can probably google up the terms for sources; eg https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/shanzhai-ji-all-you-need-to...
> 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).
> 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...
1: https://www.mobile01.com/topicdetail.php?f=165&t=1691816 2: https://ascii.jp/elem/000/000/963/963878/img.html
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...
1: https://www.mobile01.com/topicdetail.php?f=165&t=1691816 2: https://ascii.jp/elem/000/000/963/963878/img.html
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.
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.
Wonderful to see embrace, extend and extinguish happen in reverse! Nothing personal, but Microsoft was evil since the beginning
http://xahlee.info/comp/TRON_operating_system_and_encoding.h... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYfoCe6q28A
Full motion video on a 286!
http://xahlee.info/comp/TRON_operating_system_and_encoding.h... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYfoCe6q28A
Full motion video on a 286!
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.
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.
nice, did you root it or track down a working gapps installer?
With Chinese-made electric cars shipping all over the world, it feels like we are well into the end stages of shanzai.
Buying almost anything on Amazon makes it clear that shanzhai products are basically the norm rather than an exception these days.
This suggests that it they did not survive:
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/global-social-media/2015/05/06/chine...
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.
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/global-social-media/2015/05/06/chine...
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).
Huh. So they’re impersonating real AirPods to get the pairing pop-up?
There are some unique things on aliexpress. amazon basics is just clone stuff.
> In a sense, I feel like the shanzhai are brethren of the classic western notion of hacker-entrepreneurs, but with a distinctly Chinese twist to them.
Accurate.
Accurate.
Nowadays in China, I rarely hear this word, maybe since 2015, as the industry transforms and encourages innovation,more and more high value-added products are flooding the copycat products
I think the term has evolved on an arc similar to how the term 'hacker' evolved from the 1960's until now - from curiosity, to derogatory, to underdog, to cultural phenomenon, to a category label that is used and misused as a matter of convenience. Each step the exact meaning and spirit changed. I agree it's not as common in use today, but I hear it mentioned with a wink and a nudge to describe... something in between an attitude and a policy. For example, a few years back I was talking with someone about the policy initiative to promote EV research and development. The term 'shanzhai' was descriptively applied to the desired outcome of the policy and the types of players who would see it through, and the nature of the market strategy. Everyone nodded in understanding, even though it was clear the usage wasn't exactly in line with its original coinage.
All the comments suggesting the end of "Shanzhai" makes me wonder. Where is the next frontier of hacker-entrepreneurs?
The scale of cheap money and "Enterprise Entrepreneurialism" has made it very hard to discern wheat from the chaff, of course.
But I have a strong feeling --and I understand what that word means-- that there is something beyond all the grafts and scams and profiteering in the intersection of Virtual Reality, Crypto-Currencies, Internet of Things, and the availability of the personal computing capacity (ultra-powered smart phones) that is going to change the world, but I can't put my finger on it.
The scale of cheap money and "Enterprise Entrepreneurialism" has made it very hard to discern wheat from the chaff, of course.
But I have a strong feeling --and I understand what that word means-- that there is something beyond all the grafts and scams and profiteering in the intersection of Virtual Reality, Crypto-Currencies, Internet of Things, and the availability of the personal computing capacity (ultra-powered smart phones) that is going to change the world, but I can't put my finger on it.
> Where is the next frontier of hacker-entrepreneurs?
World War III, probably. Wherever that may take place. Seems like Taiwan, Eastern Europe, or the Middle East are the current prime candidates.
Symmetric conflicts is when technology really makes leaps and bounds.
World War III, probably. Wherever that may take place. Seems like Taiwan, Eastern Europe, or the Middle East are the current prime candidates.
Symmetric conflicts is when technology really makes leaps and bounds.
I struggle to think of a conflict in any of the regions named to be symmetric. Unfortunately, or fortunately?, short of a nuclear war, we are never going to get symmetric war given how integrated the international economy is.
Consider the case of Ukraine and Russian sanctions, all but a sham and politicking with Turkey, China, and even US while being at the helm of sanctions, continue to trade directly or indirectly with Russia.
Reminds me of the famous line attributed to Albert Einstein that, "World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones" because the WWIII can't be but a Nuclear Armageddon.
Consider the case of Ukraine and Russian sanctions, all but a sham and politicking with Turkey, China, and even US while being at the helm of sanctions, continue to trade directly or indirectly with Russia.
Reminds me of the famous line attributed to Albert Einstein that, "World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones" because the WWIII can't be but a Nuclear Armageddon.
maybe those shanzhai hackers will finally have bitcoin and then Freedom Goes Up forever.
Look at the financial crisis in china going on that will require loads of stimulus.
Look at the financial crisis in china going on that will require loads of stimulus.
I think the clever ones learned a while back that market research is more important than R&D, so now they make trending products like mini sticker printers, battery packs and Stanley knock offs.
I really loved the Strange Parts videos where he went to these shops. So interesting.
> the shanzhai could not only make an iPhone clone, they could improve it by giving the clone a user-replaceable battery
I don't think there is really a market for user-replaceable batteries, I have it picked as something the vocal minority want. But this is the productive way for people prove it as being a good idea or not.
It is very depressing that in the EU it would be legislated, in the US there'd be a big fight between the political parties about whether it should be legislated, and the Chinese bureaucrats are presumably too disorganised to mandate any which way so someone just builds it back in '09. Once the US would have been the home of this sort of free market capitalism.
There is a lesson here about bandwidth, governments, IP law and effective strategy.
I don't think there is really a market for user-replaceable batteries, I have it picked as something the vocal minority want. But this is the productive way for people prove it as being a good idea or not.
It is very depressing that in the EU it would be legislated, in the US there'd be a big fight between the political parties about whether it should be legislated, and the Chinese bureaucrats are presumably too disorganised to mandate any which way so someone just builds it back in '09. Once the US would have been the home of this sort of free market capitalism.
There is a lesson here about bandwidth, governments, IP law and effective strategy.
A "vocal minority" with a wallet is a market.
The question is probably "is the market it represents sufficient to sustain a product line which focuses on it?"
There are plenty of niche manufacturers who prove that you can survive in the smartphone business selling something other than "the exact form factor Apple and Samsung are offering". Oukitel with their 20,000 mAh batteries comes to mind.
The question is probably "is the market it represents sufficient to sustain a product line which focuses on it?"
There are plenty of niche manufacturers who prove that you can survive in the smartphone business selling something other than "the exact form factor Apple and Samsung are offering". Oukitel with their 20,000 mAh batteries comes to mind.
> I don't think there is really a market for user-replaceable batteries
Why do you think so?
Why do you think so?
People didn't go crazy buying those Chinese knock-offs. They kept buying phones with the batteries sealed in them.
As a gut check, it does make sense people would prefer sturdiness and waterproofing to replaceable batteries and it seems likely that those things pull phone design in opposite directions.
As a gut check, it does make sense people would prefer sturdiness and waterproofing to replaceable batteries and it seems likely that those things pull phone design in opposite directions.
People don't want to buy knock-offs and given up on Apple support and services, yes, they value that more than replaceable batteries, but if apple did provide replaceable batteries, people would happily pay a premium for it, even for the sake of "quick charge" alone.
What type of premium and how many people are you estimating? And how? Because Apple doesn't think it is worth the trade offs and they know a thing or two about making well designed phones.
I suspect that if you want a phone designed to different tastes, you will have to buy a phone made by someone else. Like the Chinese one under discussion.
I suspect that if you want a phone designed to different tastes, you will have to buy a phone made by someone else. Like the Chinese one under discussion.
You can simply look at the sale of battery packs and pocket size portable batteries. It is relatively large.
> Because Apple doesn't think it is worth the trade offs and they know a thing or two about making well designed phones.
That is a flawed way of thinking, apple is interested in optimising profits, not well designed phones, or at least not more than sales and revenue.
> Because Apple doesn't think it is worth the trade offs and they know a thing or two about making well designed phones.
That is a flawed way of thinking, apple is interested in optimising profits, not well designed phones, or at least not more than sales and revenue.
Admittedly I don't know anything about this beyond OP's 15-year-old blog post.