(FYI, the pic above is of a fake HTC TyTn II)
Now we here at IntoMobile are often posting about faked versions of major manufacturer handsets that we’ve seen – only a few months back, barely a week used to go by without a new set of “fake vs real” pics (you can check some of them out here and here).
Well, now, according to James Hilton (who is a director at a Mobile Marketing company called Inside Mobile), the fake handsets are making it near-impossible to deliver content that can will render properly on screen.
“It’s a big problem because, as Hilton says, China Mobile already has more subscribers than there are people living in the USA. Plus there are actually two major Chinese mobile operators – the other being China Unicom. Hilton believes that as many as 60 per cent of handsets possessed by Chinese subscribers are clones rather than the real thing.”
The issues come when the content delivery systems need to identify the handset, to ascertain which specific version of the digital asset should be delivered – because the “knock-off” handsets identify themselves either with incorrect data, or not at all, the appropriate content cannot be sent – and hence may not appear on-screen correctly.
accessing the system.
Anyway, the upshot is that Hilton wouldn’t suggest to international brand owners to launch major ad campaigns (yes, it comes back to money) in China because there is no guarantee the ads will render correctly.
There is also apparently a knock-on effect that could occur with other kinds of content such as games – although there is enough of an issue right now with all the versions of a game that need to be created for Mobile handsets that ARE official!
Still, not being able to access correctly-fomatted content properly on a device that bought has got to be frustrating ….
[Via: The Inquirer]