China moving up the value chain

I’ve been thinking about buying a new MP3 player recently, but I know that I won’t use it all that much once I buy it: it’s something I want to use on the bus into work from time to time, not a major lifestyle accessory. That being the case, I really don’t want to spend too much on buying one, and that probably rules out an iPod – at least, at full price. So I was a bit surprised to see Carrefour selling an iPod Nano at what seemed to be a knockdown price. It turned out not to be an iPod at all, but a clone from a Chinese manufacturer called Meizu. It looks identical, and the feature set seems to be the same.

I’d never heard of Meizu before, but by chance the name re-appeared today, in an excellent article in Popular Science: China’s iClone. This is required reading for anyone interested in China’s economy, in intellectual property, or in case studies of economic development. Essentially, Meizu have not only reverse-engineered the iPhone, they’ve extended it and improved upon Apple’s original design – according to the article at least.

One very interesting snippet, which I’ve not seen mentioned anywhere else, is that the iPhone’s killer feature, the touch interface, is not original to Apple in the first place: it’s licensed by Apple from…. the original, Chinese, developers. Who knew?

The article ranges far beyond phones, though, to show how China is moving from cheap fakes, to reverse-engineered copies, to original designs in exactly the same way as China and Korea did before it – but much, much faster.

Once China is producing its own design value, of course, we’ll see much stricter enforcement of IP protection laws, which will in turn probably see the end of the RMB8 DVD, and of the Beijing Silk Market, for example. A small price to pay for China becoming a design innovator…

Oh, and I haven’t yet decided on an MP3 player yet. The Meizu iPod Nano clone is still a contender, but I may go instead for a Creative Pebble, which has FM radio…