If you’ll recall, zzzPhone is offering “customized cellphones” straight from China with touchscreens and dual facing cameras. In short, these are bargain basement phones with some capacity for upgrade – the base model has been circulating in Asia and Africa for a few years now – and it was running some sort of mad Linux hybrid when we last left off.
Now, however, that the world is looking at Android the company is promising Android phones by November along with a few odd additions like a $225,000 gold model studded with beautiful diamonds. The more I look at the website, the more dubious I am. As Sascha at Gearlog points out:
I’ve spoken to both their China-based management team and to zzzPhone’s US representative Jesse Nowlin, and I don’t think they’re scam artists. But I do think they’re in over their heads. First, they took a bunch of orders on phones that didn’t work in the US, so they couldn’t deliver them. Then they started delivering phones, but some of the purchasers seem underwhelmed with what they got.
The expectation is that Android will start hitting most manufacturers – Chinese and otherwise – next month and that almost every low-end smartphone coming out of southern China will have an Android variant – after all, it’s free. Watch yourself with these guys – although I can attest to their earnest belief in the product, I’m not sure they can deliver.
UPDATE – I totally missed this TV commercial. Much clearer now.