Just a quick post to draw your attention to this presentation about Shanzhai phones in China. Shanzhai means something like ‘mountain hideout’ and they are a kind of guerrilla class of new devices appearing on the streets of Beijing.
The designs range from the batshit-crazy (but, yes, I want one):
to the *cough* aspirational:
to the only-slightly-bizarre:
to the really rather useful. (The Big Thunder is intended for farmers, who might need to work a hundred meters away from wherever they left their phone, rather than teenagers on the bus, I’m hoping).
There is also a semi serious point here.
One of the big ideas raised is that these crazy phones just don’t appear in the West. Manufacturing is so expensive here that only big, serious players can get started. However, in China, these devices can be built to order in tiny batches for a little as $40 a unit; and then sold for $150.
Innovation in product design is really expensive here in the West, and so a lot of would-be inventors have turned to the Web instead as a platform for their creativity. Hence the whole Web 2.0 thing has been a magnet for startups. In China, though, as mad as some of these products may appear, they reflect a raw creativity and inventiveness that we just don’t see here when it comes to the design of electronic devices. Many of these models will, of course, sink without a trace. But how much higher are their chances of coming up with a formula that genuinely catches people’s imagination and meets needs that no-one anticipated? The people behind these phones are rightly described as “hacker entrepreneurs”: next Dysons of the world.
This is not to write off Western phone designers, of course. Our phones are — on almost all measures — ‘better’ than these devices. But the products we have demanded and the market we’re in make this spirit of carefree, creative experimentation (without a care for focus groups, brand continuity or err… electrocution hazards) unlikely to happen very frequently.
(via. Mobile Monday)
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As most manufacturing (and a lot of the design) gets outsourced to China, is manufacturing cost the issue or the business model? IIRC, Chinese mobiles are not subsidised and so don’t need the blessing of the operators other than type approval. In the West, good luck selling a phone without a subsidy (as Google and Nokia have found). As operators aren’t going to be bothered approving every crazy design that turns up on the doorstep, small batch order phones can’t get a foothold.
As smartphones become more common and less like phones, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more novelty, pre-pay GSM-only gadgets turn up in much the same way as novelty transistor radios and calculators have in the past.
All good points, and I undoubtedly oversimplified things for the sake of brevity.
These backstreet designers have direct connections to the manufacturers, and not just the ones we’ve heard of like HTC and Foxconn, but the manufacturers of the parts that those guys use. Also, they can go to cheaper manufacturers than any Western phone brand would ever consider using.