I'm afraid I wouldn't have much to talk about. This is just a a casual interest of mine. If I see a story in the media about this sort of thing, I'll read it. A

I'm afraid I wouldn't have much to talk about. This is just a a casual interest of mine. If I see a story in the media about this sort of thing, I'll read it. And where I live, there's the infamous Pacific Mall which often has shanzhai items of all sorts. But I'm by no means a mobile expert. You'd be better off asking around at howardforums.com or something. I mainly got interested in the topic because a few years back I had a friendly bet with a friend who works at an Asian mega-corp which makes cellphones that they should start paying attention to Apple. But they had their attention on the knock-offs instead. They were totally caught flat-footed by the iPhone. Apparently their last annual meeting fell just after the launch of the iPhone 3G. When their cellphone head honcho got up to talk, apparently he took a visible sigh and essentially admitted that the high-end market, which they want to be in during the recession (focus on profit margins not unit sales) was essentially stolen from them by Apple, and that their growth numbers in this segment had been slashed. They're essentially ceding the market to Apple in the short term while they go back to the drawing board and try to get the software part right. In other words, what Apple did to them in the MP3 player market is happening to them in the cellphone market. Keep this in mind the next time somebody tells you it's foolish to think that iPhone OS won't be the defacto mobile platform in 3 years time.