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CTIA. Chinese

What show at this time and age has no Chinese exhibitors? A County Fair in North Dakota, obviously! CTIA is not in North Dakota, so there were plenty Chinese companies there, including some of the larger phone and equipment manufacturers.

Personal Communications Devices (PCD)

PCD is not a new market player although likely most of you never heard of it. Prior to July of 2008 it was called UTStarcom and only a couple of years before that - Audiovox. Although the company is American it sells mostly Chinese and only some Taiwanese and Japanese products, so we will classify it Chinese. As the company grows from Audiovox corporate connections and traditions, it mixes two business models: releasing outsourced products under its or a carrier name and distributing, providing other value added services to other manufacturers. For example, it distributed and put HTC products into US carrier’s channels way before HTC became a brand, and now it continues to warehouse, fulfill and service HTC products in North American markets. When small handset manufacturers like Sanyo and Casio release their products, it is PCD in charge of getting them sold by the wireless carriers – examples are T-Mobile Sidekick and Casio Gz-One. When US carriers want to release their own handsets under their brand – it is PCD who they approach to find them exactly what they want at the price they need. On the pictures you may see some of the lower end phones already boasting operator logos and others that maybe coming to stores near you a little later. The company also showed a Haier sourced netbook/tablet that it expects to get into one of the US carriers where it will be selling for about $200 with a contract.

Alcatel

Yes, we are classifying Alcatel as a Chinese manufacturer. It is owned by Chinese, it is run by Chinese, its phones look and feel Chinese (not bad, just inexpensive) and this is fine – the world needs a lot of inexpensive phones. A couple of new phones were displayed – a QWERTY OT-802A and a touchscreen OT-710A. Both are OK basic phones with lots of features. I also got my hands on Android OT-980 and was less than impressed – the parts of the slider felt loose and the overall quality of the screen and assembly felt subpar. Of course, it may have been the same abused phone Alcatel is showing at every show since MWC, but if this is the case whoever had this bright idea should think about a different carrier path. Considering already existing and upcoming lower end Androids from Gigabyte, Kyocera and other Chinese manufacturers, OT-980 may have a tough life ahead of it even with the $150 price tag.

Haier

Haier is making everything from refrigerators to TVs and is one of the better known Chinese brands. At this show it exhibited in a very small booth as a part of a small Chinese pavilion, but it managed to stack lots of phones into this booth. Most of these are lower end phones and the customers for them are likely to be from Central and South American markets, but the history teaches us that Chinese start carefully and cautiously, but eventually may become a major player. With the financial backing of the largest refrigerator manufacturer in the world it is possible.

Huawei

Unlike Haier Huawei had a huge booth, but most of it was dedicated to network solutions, the core company business. A few handsets were displayed, although prohibited to make pictures of. The reason? Well, maybe Chinese did not want these sneaky Europeans to steal their design ideas, we all know how it happens: Gucci designers travel to Shanghai market, see a great bag, buy a sample and next month the exact replica of it is filling the shelves of Gucci stores worldwide. We do not believe in illogical prohibitions – if you do not want to show something - do not show it, but if you do show it, it becomes a fair game. So here they are, upcoming Huawei handsets, including two Android based smartphones and a huge tablet/phone with 8” screen looking pretty good and running Android as well. Gucci designers, take a notice!

ZTE

As usual, ZTE showed a tsunami of phones and, I guess, just to see if we will notice, placed a single not announced phone into that phone ocean. Well, we did. The C76 is a pretty basic CDMA phone running BREW that for some reason has GPS, not typical for entry level devices. Other than that there was a usual collection of GSM and CDMA entry level phones, nothing spectacular, but quality built and cost efficient. Even a couple of MID were displayed. As you can see, the sign on ZTE booth says Wireless Successful Story and we have no reason to doubt it.