I've been to Shenzhen (and specifically, the mobile phone markets) a few times.
Two impressions stuck with me...
First, I don't trust anything I buy anymore. If you buy a mobile phone on ebay, or if you buy one on amazon and it isn't fulfilled directly by the manufacturer, I don't think you can have any assurance that it is truly a brand new, factory produced device. I saw stall after stall after stall of women with long spools of holographic tape and "genuine nokia" stickers by the thousands who were brazenly re-wrapping and resealing both batteries and "new" devices. Bunnie speaks of the value of his spare parts, but the box and the manual would probably have been of equal value.
Second, I was surprised by the near total absence of anything truly interesting ... I spent 2.5 days looking for any tools or devices related to osmocom/openBTS/openBSC ... sim cloning, sim tracing, IMSI catching ... development kits or test hardware... and I saw not even a trace of this. I was also keeping my eyes open for any kind of console modding / console hacking and didn't see any of this either. I'm sure you could get your xbox chipped there, but beyond that ...
I'll be back soon ... I'd love to be proven wrong that there's nothing bleeding edge being hacked together around the phone-marts...
Two impressions stuck with me...
First, I don't trust anything I buy anymore. If you buy a mobile phone on ebay, or if you buy one on amazon and it isn't fulfilled directly by the manufacturer, I don't think you can have any assurance that it is truly a brand new, factory produced device. I saw stall after stall after stall of women with long spools of holographic tape and "genuine nokia" stickers by the thousands who were brazenly re-wrapping and resealing both batteries and "new" devices. Bunnie speaks of the value of his spare parts, but the box and the manual would probably have been of equal value.
Second, I was surprised by the near total absence of anything truly interesting ... I spent 2.5 days looking for any tools or devices related to osmocom/openBTS/openBSC ... sim cloning, sim tracing, IMSI catching ... development kits or test hardware... and I saw not even a trace of this. I was also keeping my eyes open for any kind of console modding / console hacking and didn't see any of this either. I'm sure you could get your xbox chipped there, but beyond that ...
I'll be back soon ... I'd love to be proven wrong that there's nothing bleeding edge being hacked together around the phone-marts...