The Shanghai Daily reported today about a crack-down on counterfeit mobile phones in China, closing illegal phone markets in some of the major cities and regulated the second-hand phone market (how can you do that?). I normally skip this kind of reports, because it typically is a bunch of rhetoric statements that are not implemented anyway. But what struck my eye was the sentence that 25% of all mobile phones sold in China are counterfeit!

I wonder what counterfeit means in this context: do they copy the model and manufacture it at a different location, or is it actually the same phone but just not sold through official channels? Maybe this explains why my former Siemens phone did not work when temperatures dropped below zero (I used this phone while living in Beijing, so had a serious problem during the winter) or why my current SonyEricsson’s software is messed up (showing wrong names at missed calls for example).