Aside from the rather early Xmas displays, I also passed by an Apple store yesterday. There was a long patient looking line of people standing outside waiting to pick up their new pre-ordered (pre-ordained?) iPhones*.
The 6 appears to be winning over the 6 Plus, but that could be a supply thing.
I should explain that I've had an iPhone 6 shaped device for some time.
When I'm in New York I like to visit Canal Street to see what kinds of special offers are available. It usually comprises sunglasses or similar which bear the name of a famous brand, the packaging of a famous brand, but for some reason are on sale for, oh, 'ten dollar'. Maybe 'two for 18 dollar'.
My iPhone shaped device has similar cloned origins. It's from a Chinese company that produced their iPhone 6 clone back in July. It's quad processor, 13 Megapixel camera, dual SIM and runs on Android 4.4.2 (KitKat), with an iOS shell. There were two USB lightning cables and a charger (they'd be £45 from Apple) and some awful-looking headphones in the box.
To my surprise it is genuinely quite usable. All the standard smartphone capabilities work. It downloads Apps from Google Play store and they install and work correctly. The 'OK, Google' speech recognition works. The iOS style display can be toggled back and forth, so the phone can look like it's running both Android and Apple operating systems.
It won't replace my regular phone, but as a way to continue to use an old pay as you go SIM, it cost less than a burner from Tesco. It's only borderline pocketable though.
* The line I saw was quite a lot shorter than on launch day outside the Regents Street store. There's a video of it here, which is like a mini tour of Regents Street, Hanover Street, Hanover Square and Brook Street.
No comments:
Post a Comment