[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] miamicanes:
I just want to clarify something: for the most part, I like, and enthusiastically approve, of most Chinese electronics goods. If you re-read my post, most of it is actually a compliment. One area where Chinese companies have American and European companies beaten badly is aesthetic design. Chinese companies place a very high importance on making things look nice. American companies, by comparison, regard beauty as the first thing to kill when cutting costs.

Just to give a semi-related example, last year I was shopping for new laminate flooring for my house. As anyone who's been to Home Depot or Lowe's knows, American and European laminate flooring generally looks *awful*. You can tell from 20 feet away that it's fake. On the other hand, high end laminate flooring from China (intended mainly for sale in China, but occasionally ends up for sale from small companies in big cities like Miami & New York) will blow you away. You'd literally have to get on your hands & knees, with a flashlight and magnifying glass, to know for sure that it isn't real wood.

Why don't American companies, like Home Depot, sell it? They make higher profit margins selling engineered hardwood. If they sold laminate for half the price that looked 99% as good as the best hardwood, nobody would bother with engineered hardwood. That's why the only place you can buy it in America is from small businesses that literally buy a few shipping containers of it, then sell it straight from their warehouse. The 60c/foot laminate from China is just as awful as the 99c/foot laminate from WilsonArt or Pergo... but the $3-4/foot laminate from China is amazingly good.

As far as my statement that the phones wouldn't be able to work on Sprint or Verizon, and wouldn't be able to use 3G data on GSM, I maintain that it's almost certainly true *right now*. It's not because the Chinese phones are low quality or less advanced. It's due to an unfortunate combination of politics and the business practices of American cell phone carriers.

As far as I know, the United States is the only country on Earth where UMTS operates at 850MHz/850MHz (AT&T) or 1700/2200MHz (T-Mobile). OK, Canada & Mexico might use the same frequencies, but it's still a very small subset of the world market. More importantly, T-Mobile didn't even OWN those frequencies until ~3 years ago, and didn't deploy its first 1700/2200 UMTS cell for customer use until ~2 years ago. In most parts of the country, they're still in the process of deploying it, and WILL be for at least a few more years.

The FCC isn't happy about it, but it WILL tolerate the use of imported cell phones that are approved by some other government agency it respects (including those of Europe, Japan, and Canada). The problem is, THOSE foreign agencies will only certify and approve frequencies relevant to their own countries. Since 1700/2200 are irrelevant to use in their countries, they won't certify it (even if they DO certify the same phone for 1900/2100UMTS). Right now, the FCC is pretty much the only government agency that will certify a phone for 1700/2200 operation, and getting FCC approval costs about $100,000. Because it's so expensive, and because the only market where it matters is the US, NOBODY -- Chinese, Finnish, Korean, or otherwise -- is going to spend the money getting a phone approved by the FCC for 1700/2200UMTS in the US unless they already have a firm order from AT&T or T-Mobile that's contingent upon getting that approval first.

Thus, it's obviously not inconceivable that a phone not officially approved for 1700/2200UMTS might work anyway. HOWEVER, if someone were caught trying to import phones capable of 1700/2200UMTS that weren't approved by *somebody* official, they'd be confiscated and destroyed.

There IS a possible loophole: since most new cell phones have software-defined radios, it would be VERY possible for a Chinese company to export phones to the US that were approved for international UMTS frequencies (1900/2100), and were shipped with radio firmware that did ONLY those frequencies... but ALSO quietly leak the unapproved firmware that would "magically" enable 1700/2200 UMTS radio operation. Now, technically, anyone using a phone like that to do 1700/2200UMTS would be breaking the law... but as a practical matter, the phone would work fine, and nobody would know the difference.

I know this, because there were quite a few discussions about it regarding the TrollTech GreenPhone and OpenMoko. AFAIK, nobody ever managed to hack the firmware to enable 1700/2200UMTS for either phone, but that was mainly because TrollTech and FIC are big companies with a lot to lose if they made the FCC angry. On the OTHER hand, I can definitely see a small(er) Chinese handset manufacturer quietly leaking a copy of firmware capable of 1700/2200UMTS to an American importer for him to test, then order 100,000 phones to sell on eBay once he's verified that the phones can be reflashed and do 1700/2200UMTS on T-Mobile. The phones would be legal to import, because their 'out of the box' capabilities would be exactly what were officially approved... but anyone could then buy them and reflash them to do 1700/2200UMTS on Tmo. As long as the guy selling them didn't *advertise* them as 1700/2200-capable, ship them with the unapproved firmware, or get caught telling customers how to do it, the FCC couldn't touch him. He *might* even be able to get away with a disclaimer in the ad, like "WARNING: This phone is only APPROVED for 1900/2100UMTS, and MUST NOT be reflashed with unauthorized firmware to enable 1700/2200 UMTS." (making it obvious to everyone that it's not only possible, but probably quite easy to do).

As far as CDMA phones go, imported phones aren't likely to be useful in America for quite a while. There's no technical reason why they wouldn't work. The problem is that Sprint maintains a database of the ESN of every phone they officially sell, and they won't allow customers to use phones whose ESN isn't in their holy database. In theory, Verizon WILL allow you to use any unlocked CDMA phone you can get to work... but as a practical matter, this just means you can flash a Sprint phone that's the twin of a Verizon phone with Verizon firmware. Without Verizon-specific firmware, you'll have problems with data (I'm pretty sure EV-DO won't work), text messages will get mangled (Verizon formats them differently than everyone else), and the phone's voicemail indicator won't work properly.

God knows, 4-5 years ago, there were two or three Chinese-made CDMA PalmOS phones I would have *killed* to be able to use on Sprint. :cool:

The point I made about Chinese phones being "rooted out of the box" was actually a compliment, meant to illustrate that to users HERE (at XDA-develoeprs), Chinese phones are likely to be more interesting than American & European phones *if* someone can figure out how to get them onto T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon "through the back door" (or lobby China's government to twist Obama's arm and get the FCC to *force* Sprint and Verizon to let us have R-UIM cards and use any unlocked CDMA phone we want, in the name of international interoperability). I suspect the 1700/2200 problem will take care of itself in another 2-3 years (eventually, CE and the others WILL start certifying 1700/2200 capabilities, because Europeans will want phones that can officially do 3G UMTS when visiting the US), though 850UMTS is probably a lost cause for economic and technological reasons (getting a software radio that can already do 1900/2100 to also do 1700/2200 is a small change... getting it to do 850 is another matter entirely).

Likewise, the point I made about Chinese phones being very similar hardware-wise, and using nearly identical firmware, was meant to illustrate another reason why they'd likely be of interest to users HERE... if someone can get Android 2.1 to build for ONE Chinese phone, there's a good chance that they'd be able to get it to build for ANY Chinese phone built from the same reference platform and chipset. To a certain extent, that's already the case with HTC phones. In the long run, Chinese companies will be the ones that commoditize Android phones, creating hundreds of handsets that are more or less hardware-compatible as long as you have the right drivers (the way laptops are), but vary in the small details that currently frustrate so many users here. If I could buy a Chinese CDMA Android phone capable of working on Sprint with 800x480 display, 5MP camera, with a REAL gamepad (like the Sidekick has/had), and real hardkeys (I *hate* fake touchscreen buttons), I wouldn't *care* whether HTC and all of Sprint's official phones were button-free iSlabs. In the long run, China's domestic market is so big that if someone can come up with a way to keep those phones compatible with US & European networks, EVERYONE will benefit from increased choice -- especially users whose preferences differ from those of the iPhone-drooling masses. When there are 2-3 billion potential customers (between the US, Europe, and China), you can get away with making niche products that only appeal to a narrower group of buyers, because .01% of 3 billion is STILL 300,000 :)