ZTE Axon 30 Ultra: Strong effort from an entity-lister, but your tiny child hands may struggle Most phones are compromised in some way, which makes it all too easy to overlook the good bits. An example of this would be the Huawei Mate 40 Pro, which was near perfect, except for the lack of apps. For the ZTE Axon 30 Ultra, the downside is a real ache in the first dorsal interosseous muscle between the thumb and index …
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What's with all of the "Chinese phone is evil communist and will 'phone home' '" scaremongering? I'm significantly more worried about Facebook and Google than I am about ZTE or Huawei.
For years the Reg comment section has been thankfully free of deranged American right-wing blather, but I fear those days are gone.
What's next? Anti-vax spam shoehorned into every discussion?
I don't think the people commenting here are either denying the existence of or condoning China's human rights abuses. What I see them doing is questioning the accuracy of the claims of malware-laden hardware.
In addition, you will find it hard to purchase certain types of devices without paying some company in a country which has a repressive government. That's not an argument for ZTE, and their history of not updating devices and including bloatware on at least some of them means I'm unlikely to buy from them even if they release a phone instead of a window. If you know of a good way to ensure that electronics aren't built in a repressive country, I'm interested. Until then, it's infeasible to blocklist everything from China and still expect to have equipment.
Personally I'm not worried about the short-term spying. What I'm thinking about is – given China's aggressive foreign policy of late – if the situation with Taiwan or another of their neighbors degenerates and it comes to an all-out trade war with embargoes (to say nothing of an actual conflict), what's to stop the CCP from ordering all Chinese phone makers to ship a tainted firmware that bricks all phones with the Play Store installed (i.e. all those out of China)? Okay, in such a situation having a new £649 doorstop would be the last of our problems, but it doesn't help either...
That said, I'm not giving Western companies a free pass either, given what's happened post-9/11 where the telcos were basically all eager to help the US govt in the "war on terror".
Some of those companies routinely ship unauditable blobs as firmware updates. In case after some other such event the US govt informally asks companies located there to ship malicious updates, we can perhaps expect Google and Apple to tell them to get stuffed. Qualcomm? Intel? Much less so IMO.
I believe the anti-Chinese device comments are because there has been several reports of low-end Chinese made cellphones that had pre-installed malware and backdoors and even rootkits over the last few years.
The mobile malware forums at MalwareBytes has many examples:
https://forums.malwarebytes.com/forum/182-mobile-malware-removal-help-support/
I don't believe there has been any verified reports of any ZTE phones being a problem that I'm aware of though.
The whole ZTE and Huawei fears were just political.
It has 64 million points of color on the inside surface to give you a wonderful picture from the equally-sized sensor underneath it. Unfortunately, those points make the lens no longer transparent, but you are guaranteed to get that one nice picture no matter how you point the camera.
I wanted to include a second joke here, so I tried to find a unit whose symbol is P. Do we really not have any scientific units doing so? I thought we had used up most of the Latin letters for that purpose.
... if you are trying to land a small plane. Don't get me wrong, I like having a bigger screen, a 7 inch tablet is about perfect for browsing on the couch, but I am really unwilling to buy a phone I cannot put in a normal trouser pocket, or that I have to take out when trying to sit down (otherwise it would bend, or I might lose body parts).
And the price is decidedly not mid range. Yeah, the so called flag ships are even more expensive, I know, but it is still an awful lot of money for a bloody phone that will get dropped within a year and be obsolete after three.Still, it keeps the money in circulation, so I guess that's a good thing?
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