Bent Chinese handsets cause content headache
Fakery causes jiggery-pokery
THERE IS a surprisingly high number of small Chinese handset manufacturers creating cloned handsets. And they are giving content providers a major headache.
According to James Hilton, a director with Inside Mobile – a mobile marketing specialist – fake handsets are making it virtually impossible to deliver adverts to the Chinese market which can be guaranteed to render properly.
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.
This causes problems for content delivery because content delivery systems have acquired a significant degree of intelligence and are normally able to guess what kind of handset is accessing the system.
They can devine, for example, what mobile OS is being used and from that estimate the handset model, screen size and browser type. This all goes terribly pear-shaped in China where a handset might have an OS cloned from Nokia but a screen the size of an Iphone.
The upshot is that Hilton wouldn't advise international brand owners to launch a major ad campaign in China because there's no guarantee adverts will work properly.
This problem could have a knock-on effect. Mobile games houses might prove reluctant to create games for the Chinese market because they can't guarantee the correct version of the game will actually be delivered to a 'cloned' handset
Fakery causes jiggery-pokery
THERE IS a surprisingly high number of small Chinese handset manufacturers creating cloned handsets. And they are giving content providers a major headache.
According to James Hilton, a director with Inside Mobile – a mobile marketing specialist – fake handsets are making it virtually impossible to deliver adverts to the Chinese market which can be guaranteed to render properly.
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.
This causes problems for content delivery because content delivery systems have acquired a significant degree of intelligence and are normally able to guess what kind of handset is accessing the system.
They can devine, for example, what mobile OS is being used and from that estimate the handset model, screen size and browser type. This all goes terribly pear-shaped in China where a handset might have an OS cloned from Nokia but a screen the size of an Iphone.
The upshot is that Hilton wouldn't advise international brand owners to launch a major ad campaign in China because there's no guarantee adverts will work properly.
This problem could have a knock-on effect. Mobile games houses might prove reluctant to create games for the Chinese market because they can't guarantee the correct version of the game will actually be delivered to a 'cloned' handset