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A comment on Chinese company uses leaked photos to copy, patent iPhone 5 design. Parent comment

Re:Chinese company uses leaked photos to copy, patent iPhone... by tluyben2 on Friday September 07, 2012 @06:31AM (#4488424)
I am aware of that :) I don't say it's impossible if you have enough resources (like Apple). For a small(er) company it's very hard to do it though. Even if you go there. For instance OpenPandora.org has had a lot of miserable quality from the casings coming from China. They moved production to Germany.
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Re:Chinese company uses leaked photos to copy, patent iPhone... by tsahyt on Friday September 07, 2012 @07:10AM (#4488512)
German production is almost always superior in quality to the far-east products, there's no doubt about that. You've got to give that to the germans, they do know how to produce things. They're more expensive though, and unfortunately that is what ultimately counts for the big players.

That's also what I suspect to be the prime reason why we haven't got a proper free phone yet. Free as in free speech that is, running some variation of Linux with the necessary device drivers to use GSM/HSDPA/LTE/whatever, since Android isn't really free. It's just jolly expensive to build one of those if you're a small player and customers aren't prepared to pay for it.

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