“Next month will see the launch of a handset which outperforms the iPhone, at £200, from a man who admits he’s been waiting for Steve Jobs to die,” Bill Ray reports for The Register.
“That man is Lie Jun, and the phone is the much-anticipated Xiaomi handset. The release date is 18 December,” Ray reports. “Xiaomi is an Android-based handset with a dual-core processor, and sold 300,000 pre-orders in 34 hours thanks to an (unsubsidised) price of only £200, and a man who openly aped the head of Apple and even predicted his own success would come out of Steve Jobs’ demise.”
Ray reports, “‘[Steve] Jobs will die someday, so there are still opportunities for us. The meaning of our existence is just waiting for him to kick the bucket,’ he told Entrepreneur magazine a scant two months before Steve did indeed kick the aforementioned bucket.”
Read more in the full article here.
Nice hat. Where’s your cattle?
Embargo that shithole. Obamanator hasn’t the ‘ands, so someone needs to step up and shut down that craphole of a thieving nation.
“Those prototypes are showing some production concerns, including flaking paint and cracking cases, according to local reports, though these are dismissed by Lie Jun in typical Jobsian style.”
Huh? If Apple had these problems, this would not have been dismissed by Steve.
Translation:
“We suck at design so much that our only real chance of success is waiting for the master to die”
Wow… I’m sure the end user experience on this device is top notch.
Lie Jun is the genuis. after steve j. die off lie set new standards you see. to tell me china steal intellectal properties make you look as clueless monkey. he who no idea of true inovation.the america imperalism is over.soon to surpass in military as the making of goods.
China4evar is the new zunetang. Got it.
Having lived in Asia and known many people of different ethnic background, including Chinese, one thing I’m certain of is that all of them are very aware of counterfeiting and fake brand name products, because those things have been all over Asia since the industrial age began. These people are also aware of the difference between the real thing and a fake, and the only reason a fake even makes sense is to fool casual observers at first glance that someone has the original, thus achieving some modicum of perceived status. Given a choice, all of them would turn their noses down on the fake and take the original without hesitation. As the Asian middle and upper classes evolve, the demand for top quality or original products (usually non-Chinese or Asian by their way of thinking) skyrockets. BMWs. Mercedes. Rolex. Italian and French designer fashions. Coke. Leica. Nikon… Apple. Etc. Apple will sell all the iPhones they can make just in China alone, if seeing the scalping of iPhone 4s’s for huge profits in Hong Kong is any indication. Even if the government bans them, the affluent Chinese consumer will get them on the black market for whatever price the market will bear. Just like the original iPhone sold in Russia, where Russians were buying round trip tickets to the States just to load up on iPhones and take them back to sell in Russia on the black market. Personally, I know a Ukranian-American real estate broker who made several trips to Russia with a suitcase full of iPhones and made more money doing this than selling real estate in a failing market. I highly doubt any copycat product will ever have this ability to generate demand approaching lust like the iPhone has. Nothing has changed since 2007 in that respect.
Interesting insight. Good to see a balanced thoughtful response.
All good points, shame you included BMW in your example though. Now a ghetto brand in my country. Somebody I know has one and all his friends call it “the clitoris” because it’s red and every **** has one.
I’m going to make a wild-ass guess here and suggest that all of your friends’ friends, and you, are male.
Oh, that asshole. DIAF.
#DestinedToFail
Pffft
The ONLY thing china could make for $200 that could be an “iPhone killer” would be a sledge hammer.
Keep your cheapshit android crap out of the news.
Just because Steve Jobs is gone doesn’t mean Apple won’t go after him if he’s done a copy of the iPhone. As far an android copy, who gives a darn. Virus infected crap is all you’ll get out of it.
Kind of harsh. Im sure all those no name chinese appstores are screened for malware and anything bad!;)
As far as this “new” phone being able to “outperform” an iPhone… what does that really mean? This guy’s trying to go back to the old paradigm used in the PC wars that it’s all about megahertz/RAM, etc. But, anyone who has used an iPhone or other iOS device like my iPad, this “new” phone’s inability to run any of my apps or connect and sync via iTunes or iCloud means that this “new” phone will actually be unable to perform much of anything at all, other than perhaps make a voice call or surf the web, which I already have been able to do with iPhone since 2007. The word “outperform” is clearly a bogus gimmick intended to attract the uninitiated who have no idea what the connected world of iOS is all about. Add Siri to the mix, and it becomes hard to imitate successfully, beyond the superficial, copycat, “fake-Rolex” concept. And clearly selling it for $200 or less only will either lose them money, or mean there are manufacturing corners being cut everywhere. The Chinese can’t rely on cheap, manual labor forever in the modern age of manufacturing. In the end, it’s all about originality and good, solid engineering done before a product is released.
Finally, if this guy thinks Apple, Inc. is going to simply ignore any violations of their patents because Jobs isn’t around any more, I think he may be stupider than he sounds.
Like a basketball player on a winning team silently pointing to the scoreboard in response to an opponent’s trash talkin’, Apple usually “auto-responds” to all these wannabes with each of its quarterly financial reports.
It also sounds to me like it is Bill Ray, the writer of this article, who seems to be making all the hyped-up claims (“Next month will see the launch of a handset which outperforms the iPhone …”, “….. the phone is the much-anticipated Xiaomi handset”, “…sold 300,000 pre-orders…”)
And how do you say “kick the bucket” in Chinese? Does it have the same connotations? I’ve worked in journalism in Asia, and I’ve seen first-hand that there are Western journalists who take liberties with whatever is said – sometimes fabricating whole quotations just to spice up a story – because nobody back home is going to bother holding them to task, and because the people they are quoting are unlikely to ever see what they wrote, or even if they did, understand it like someone totally proficient in English.
It’s like some of the old Vietnam War correspondents who wrote “first-person witness” accounts of bloody battlefield carnage after a night at a Bangkok bar listening to soldiers on R ‘n’ R.
However, it is equally possible that Lie Jun did say that, in which case he’s just exposed himself to be a man without class or sensitivity (though I’m sure even he did not know his comments would take on new meaning because Jobs WOULD pass away just two months later).
with a attitude like that, this guy needs to be slapped upside his mindless head… what kind of person says something like that? he’s the same kind of jacka$$ that says things like “when my grandma dies, i’m getting $20,000 and when my parents die i’ll be rich’… what a heartless idiot… and anyone who buys ANYTHING this jacka$$ makes should be checked for a lack of education…
I’m waiting for Lie Jun to die.
It’s Android, the only thing it will kill is itself.