Android In A Whitebox – Is It Going To Work?
Whitebox handsets are getting bigger and bigger; they will take up 13% of the handset market globally and more so almost 50% of the market in China this year, as we have reported in a previous article.
And just when you think you know it all already, there’s another bomb on the ticking clock: Android whitebox handsets! Yes, the massive black market of handsets are going posh: instead of the old and clunking MTK 25 or MTK 26 operating systems that most of the whitebox handsets are equipped with, they’re adopting the new baby we all love: Android.
In the city of Shenzhen, so called “city of whitebox handsets”, insiders from one of the whitebox workshops disclosed:
Our own Android handsets have been put into trial production, and they will be sent to the market in batchs.
And they’re not alone! Several other legitimate handset factories are also working on their Android handsets, with supreme functions such as Push-Mail they never thought they could get on their own products; thanks to the cute little robot!
Why Android? You may ask.
As a matter of fact, the whitebox handset workshops have been looking at extending their products to a more advanced and sophiscated. Apart from the fact that Android is one of the best mobile OS out there, I personally love Android over almost any of the other mobile OS, it free! And it’s an open platform just like MTK, where the whitebox factories can do whatever they want to adjust to their own hardware (ironically this reminds me China Mobile and their OPhone…).
And to be more exact, as the profit of whitebox handset are getting slimmer and slimmer, where reporters have said that it could go as little as 10 CNY per handset profit, smarter handsets such as an Android enabled whitebox handset might bring around 200 CNY profit per handset. Now you tell me why they’re rushing for it.
Anyhow, what I’m saying is that we all now that smart phones are getting bigger share in the handset market, and whitebox handsets are reproducing like a brood of healthy cockroaches. Now you put the cute green little man into the rustling Whitebox, well, I smell firework in the air.
Also a little reference for the over all whitebox handsets market in China, reported by Raw Plunger ???.
Financial Time Chinese posted an article that the industry set to tighten rules on handset codes by introducing a stricter regime for the allocation of handset identification numbers, in order to rein the rapid growth of illegitimate handsets, also referenced in several Chinese cyberspace.
The article pointed out that the shipment of whilebox handsets
were set to jump 44 per cent to 145m units, or 13 per cent of the global legitimate handset market, this year.
The tighter restrictions might be able to delay the rapid growth of the ultimate whitebox handsets, but in the remote country of China, where everything has a way of working round, those once illegitimate handsets have found their way getting into the legitimate market.
Not only in China, the most commonly used distribution channel for handsets are not through carriers as the western world; the handsets are sold in small shop, big flee market for electronics, where you can buy anything including iPhone (you can choose you want the US version, EU version, HK version… you name it), or the very alike clone of branded handsets.
But also many of those whilebox handset homebrew house has now grown big that they either have set up their own brand or became a supplier for bigger domestic manufacturers.
The fact is that the statistics have shown that about 50% of the handsets currently in the hands of Chinese mobile phone users are from domestic, neither a domestic manufacture or Whitebox homebrew house. Given that the mobile subscribers has topped 650 million, there’re about 300 million of those handsets are out there already being sold.
When it is still a small river it makes sense to build a dam to control its current, but when it has become an ocean, it is just nonsense try to stop the wave. Chris Anderson said in his book FREE: China is the place where piracy has won. Figuring out a way to join the flow and make it better regulated to fit in the legislated world, is better than trying to cut them out, and struggle to protect the interest of the big boys.
References from Sohu IT.
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