I don’t want to be too generalist but suffice to say there was an ocean of Samsung, Nokia and Apple lookalikes (114 types to be precise) with prices so low that I wondered why the exhibitors bothered to spend the time and money coming here to show them.

A Samsung S3 clone was expected to retail for about $100. It looked for all the world just like it – locally made 1.2 GHz quad core, 4.7” HD touch screen, 8MP camera, 3G, Android Jelly Bean and wait for it dual sim cards and a dual standby mode! A 5” S4 version was about $120 and a 5.7” ‘S5’ version is also available for about $140.

The iPhone 4 and 5 lookalikes running Android were a little hard to take – you just don’t expect to see any other UI than iOS.

Down the aisle there were Samsung Galaxy Note and Tab lookalikes that started from $50 for a 7” to about $130 for a 10.1” quad core, 6800mAh battery tablet – all decent specifications and all looking pretty well made.

I swear I was looking at Monster headphones but no these were unpronounceable.

Opinion

I am not being facetious when I refer to these as lookalikes – to the initiated they are all reasonably obvious knock-offs.

The point is that Asia (and the world) is a huge market and the demand for cheap handsets (as long as they work and look OK) is phenomenal.

In most cases the manufacturers try to ‘improve’ the design by adding dual sims or other features.