卦Trigram 2.0
Asian Snowcrash

Slashphone brings the news that when the Meizu M8 is released in February next year, it will hit the market not just in China, but also in the US. Apparently it will be previewed at a trade show in the States in January.

Hm. So much for my hopes of making a fortune by selling them from China on eBay….

I’ll be in Beijing in February, so it’s likely I’ll be getting one. The question is, do I buy a CECT T100 in the meantime? I’ll have to make that decision in the next couple of days…

Interesting to see a lot of traffic recently coming from a post on Yahoo’s finance boards; this is to my post discussing the CECT T100 - the phone with biometric security. It seems I’m not the only one interested in what’s going on with Chinese phone design.

From that Yahoo! thread, I see that the T100 is available for CNY1380, or SGD270 - which is a pretty good price. Some Beijing-based friends are coming to Singapore soon; perhaps I should ask them to bring me one…

Apparently the T100 is being very well-received within China; at least, so say China Economic Review.

The development of biometric security for phones very much seems to be driven by Asian demand. A quick review finds that:

• LG are introducing fingerprint-access phones for the Korean market.
• Hitachi bringing out a model in Japan.

Singapore, of course, is home to the most notorious example of the dangers of losing your phone. My own phone didn’t have anything controversial on it in the least, but as our phones increasingly become our gateway to our online selves, our address-book of first resort, our digital recorders of our everyday curiosity…. the need for better security is clear. This is a trend to watch.

New shots of the Meizu M8, aka MiniOne:

A new colour scheme… It seems that the release date has been pushed back to Feb/March next year - around the time I’ll be in Beijing… Pity, had hoped to get one before then… I wonder if it’s any coincidence that the iPhone is due to be released in Asia around the same time….

Update 18 Nov 2007:

This post from Little Red Blog makes me wonder whether the delay is due to licensing issues. On the other hand, Olivia Chung’s article on the liberalization of the phone market - which I wrote about recently - would suggest that this problem should be going away. Anybody know?

I was writing recently about losing my Nokia 6708, and was talking about it off-line with Niti. One of the annoying things about it was the lack of a password, meaning that the handset can be sold on and re-used by whoever’s got it now. The only security measure available was for the SIM card, not the phone itself; we were wondering why such an obvious and needed feature wasn’t available for what was quite an expensive smartphone.

Happily, my new iPod does have password-protection, so at least if this goes AWOL, no-one will be able to benefit from it…

Anyway, I read an article today on Virtual China, about a Chinese-designed phone that seems to be pretty well-protected, with fingerprint-ID required. This is the CECT T100 (heh, sci-fi fans will be smirking at that). By the way, beware the CECT website - every link seems to open in a new window, and they have horrible background music on every page. But if they can’t do web design, their phones seem to be done very well - to me, it’s a reasonably nice-looking phone, with an interesting set of features that will suit the Chinese businessman on the go! (Not necessarily what I would want in a phone myself, but it features streaming TV and Karaoke as well as the usual multimedia features). Most important, though, is the biometric access control. Pretty cool…

When China Tech News reviewed the T100, the comments list seems to indicate that it already has a substantial global following; the most common query is about the lack of a manual in English. This suggests to me that people are buying it from Chinese suppliers based on its design, but that the company isn’t actively marketing it outside China.

I know from my time living in Beijing that the phone shops are very well-stocked with locally-designed handphones, and it would appear that their quality is just getting better and better. China definitely seems to be innovating fast in this sector, and once they start making a serious effort to market internationally, they would seem set to transform the market - particularly as here in Asia there’s none of this ridiculous locking of handsets to one particular network, as I read about in the US and Europe…