It's because in 2015, Amazon was opening up the marketplace to third-party vendors, but didn't want to take on the enormous job of quality control for those products. So they established the Amazon Brand Registry in an attempt to force the US Patent and Trademark Office to help them.
They basically hoped that vendors would respond by going through the enormous effort to get a high-value trademark for something like a "Quality Appliances" brand, expending an enormous amount of discovery and legal fees (or just being a pre-existing well-known brand like KitchenAid[TM] or General Electric[TM]. That trademark would be so valuable that they would never risk importing lead-contaminated aluminum cookware and tarnishing their image, they'd implement strict quality control, fight back against counterfeiters using their likeness, and otherwise be a reliable vendor for Amazon. Right?
Wrong. It's basically free and instant to file for a trademark for CHUKOFAZ[TM] kitchen products, because it's not a word or even a substring of a word that anyone would want to trademark. So the vendors did that, submitted their valid trademark for CHUKOFAZ[TM] to the Amazon Brand Registry, and imported the cheapest junk that they could build. And then consumers sorted by "price low to high" and a bought CHUKOFAZ mixer instead of KitchenAid, and raged at Amazon and the CPSC, because the CHUKOFAZ brand had ceased to exist, and the product page they'd bought from was now a HAKLBUC-brand backpack with 2500 5-star reviews praising how well it mixed cookie dough.
It goes further, once the CHUKOFAZ pages fill up with poor reviews, no biggie, the brand is worthless anyway so just make a new one. Cue JUGGOKIT kitchen products.
I ran across Amazon's KUNTLEY (also KUNTLY make you more safety) storefront when I was looking for Anbernic's pretty nice looking (and undoubtedly copyright-violating) game emulation handheld.
Is it really that different from Nokia, Nintendo, Siemens, Lenovo, Asus, Samsung, Ikea, Ferrari, Volvo, etc.? None of those sound reputable by themselves, they had to build up a reputation.
Hell, I'd probably buy a Zolimo Barbertron just FOR the name!
Most of those are at least "real names" though, which you can find some sort of significance behind. Either named after a place or person, or with some sort of meaning. Rather than names that seem to be randomly generated 5-7 character vaguely pronounceable names that aren't already in use.
Maybe if you look them up, but I bet the average person has no idea what Lenovo, Asus, Volvo, Nintendo, Samsung, and IKEA mean.
Even more modern company names are kinda like that... Anker, DJI, Haier, Dalian Wanda, Kagi, Vercel, Nexon, Plex, Splunk, Zyxel, Sonos, Zynga, Hulu, Etsy, Yandex...
Maybe if they just used a better random name generator with a better appreciation for English phonemes, we'd never know the difference lol.
Interpretations mostly off the top of my head with wikipedia lookups for some of the non-English names:
Lenovo - the new thing;
Asus, Volvo - vaguely anatomical in English, but actually from pegasus and "I roll" in Latin;
Nintendo - 任天堂 might mean something in Japanese;
Samsung - 삼성/三星 "three stars" in Korean;
IKEA - IK is from founder Ingvar Kamprad's initials, EA more obscurely from his home farm and village;
Anker - big and heavy "anchor", appropriate for power adapters;
Kagi - means "key" in Japanese;
Nexon - from Nexus, their (still running!) 1996 MMORPG;
Plex - from multiplex or cineplex;
Sonos - from sound;
Hulu - sounds like "hula" but apparently from Mandarin;
Etsy - from "etc.", implying you can find "everything else";
Yandex - Yet Another + (network) Index.
They seem to be fairly sensible names for the most part.
Edit: Actually, I don't think DJI and Haier were Amazon brands either. DJI was bootstrapped by a college kid's family after transitioning from selling electronic parts. Haier was in SE Asia before the US.
Anker was though. Along with Aukey, RavPower, Mpow... some of those were eventually kicked off though, I think.
No they didn't. What are you talking about?! DJI has zero to do with anything amazon. Da-Jiang Innovations started with mainland students at HKUST almost twenty years ago and then moved to Shenzhen. No amazon whatever marketplace back then.
Da Lian Wanda group is a property developer and cinema owner etc in China that sells neither houses nor cinemas on amazon.
Haier as a name has been around since Liebherr JV'ed with Qingdao refrigerator in 1984. Amazon was founded ten years later!
Please don't use LLMs to post on here. There need to be at least a minimum of truth or facts when posting.
Trademarks, in some ways, have stronger protections if they’re made up (I.e., “fanciful”). You’re going to have a challenging time protecting a trademark of a common word than a made up one.
Back in 2000/1, I had such trouble taking them seriously, with that name and that colourful logo, I was like, whuuuut? But then I started using it and obviously it was miles ahead of everything else. That taught me a good lesson on whether you need a clever brand name or not. The product makes the brand name, not the other way around.
Or just not put them in all caps all the time. I guess there is so little pushback from Amazon on this they don't even need to bother making names sound real.
> Amazon sellers use strange brand names to make it easier to get a trademark.
Amazon's Brand Registry requires sellers to have a registered trademark to list their products. The fastest way to get a trademark is to use a name that's unrelated to actual words
I believe there was a youtube minidoc from the wendover productiont type channel on this.
> Small brands capitalized on the market’s transition from 2G to 3G/4G, benefitting from strong entry-tier demand, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
It's normal for companies to use different names to operate in different markets. There's some bidirectional setting of value through exclusivity that happens in some cases as well, like with Nismo. It's not exclusively an American concept.
I always found it interesting that in other countries, they trade under "National"-- an even more perfectly English sounding word. I have a radio that I suspect originally game from the German market with a "National Panasonic" badge, because I guess they couldn't quite decide what brand to use.
Who are they catering to? 99% of these companies are reselling the same crap you see on Aliexpress, so I can't imagine they bother to use the same branding domestically
In particular, check out numbers 5, 20, 29, 32-36, and very specifically, number 40, should interest you. (See 24-27 if you take umbrage at the applicability of the previous set of rules.)
I have some compression underwear by DEVOPS brand. It's very mildly amusing every time I see them in the laundry. Also the worst compression shorts I've ever seen but I guess you kind of have to expect that
I have some of those shorts myself. IMO, they're surprisingly good -- some of the best shorts I have.
Sadly, I fear that I won't be able to find those shorts again to buy any more pairs, because of the way these brands pop up and then go away again so quickly.
The two past champions are "Fartpeach" products and "Dickass" brand car brakes. Both are gone -- the Fartpeach brand is retired entirely and Dickass changed their name ... to Dickase. Some remnants of the former remain, e.g. https://www.amazon.in/FartPeach-Professional-Mountain-Suspen...
I picked up a Doogee S55 as my travel phone sometime 2015-2017. It's still my secondary phone today. Battery is on its last legs and the rugged case is as well, but squeezing 6 years of utility out of a ~$200 phone? Hell yeah. Not everything sold on AliExpress is total dogshit.
My first thought too. I can't stand Amazon nowadays, even if you know what you want exactly you still need to deal with load of counterfeit and bogus junk.
I miss HTC (yeah, they're not dead officially, yet).
From making ODM PDAs/phones for Dell/Compaq/HP/Google to becoming one of the top smartphone makers and playing with VR/beats headphones and into oblivion.
To this day, the G1/HTC Dream is my favorite phone I've ever had. Each phone since then has been more or less a utilitarian upgrade, but that one was just fun. I loved popping out the slide out keyboard with that satisfying click.
(It could have also been a reflection of where I was in life. I was firmly in my fun years, moved cities twice, and met my wife with that phone. I wonder if there are going to be people in the future similarly nostalgic for, I don't know, the Samsung Galaxy A9 because it's what they took to college.)
I had a HTC Desire Z, and I believe there were a few more models with a full QWERTY keyboard after that. I found it pretty hard to type on (I had a Nokia E61 before which somehow seemed easier), yet more than once when on call I SSHed into production to resolve issues directly from the phone :D
Part of the issue then was touchscreens were still pretty bad in terms of accuracy and sensitivity, and screens were small, so if you wanted to type something fast you needed a physical keyboard. Today I feel like I could do the same with any 6" phone with the on-screen keyboard.
For a while there, HTC was starting to look like the house brand for Windows Mobile/Pocket PC phones (I'm talking pre-WinMo6.x days). In the mid-00's, if you wanted a Windows phone in the U. S., you bought a Cingular/HTC 8125 with the sweet sliding keyboard. Then I bought an iPhone, quit paying attention to HTC, and later realized they're about gone. WTF happened to you, HTC?
A few were, definitely. LG stands out as the biggest innovator to leave the market. Less competition in the android market is a problem, in my view. Most people's interests are covered between Pixel and Samsung, true. But what happens when google gets greedy and decides to lock the Pixel bootloader? Where the hell will people who want a privacy oriented phone go? stuck with pinephone or fairphone?
Even Samsung has been way more cautious and tame with their designs, excluding the Folding devices which are true innovations.
Not to mention picking a Pixel phone has always meant making hardware choices you may or may not find acceptable. It used to mean being stuck with a muddy POLED display and bizarre hardware issues that crop up four months in. Now it means a Tensor chip that consistently underperforms its Snapdragon counterpart and whose poor Mali drivers essentially keep you from any kind of serious game emulation.
Interesting to see Google is still up to their old nonsense. I bought every Nexus phone but the Nexus 5 failed me really badly in my first overseas trip. Battery was constantly draining doing nothing, terrible bugs with the GPS module and right before I left I updated my non rooted stock OS to the latest version only to discover the hard way that they introduced a bug that completely broke video recording. I only discovered when I came back home and all my videos were filled with muddled audio. Ruined multiple priceless moments.
I had a friend on that trip have a perfectly working iPhone 5 throughout the trip and it finally got me to bite the bullet and try an iPhone. That led to me trying out a Mac and now I am completely in the Apple ecosystem after 15+ years of switching back and forth between Windows and Linux and probably never looking back. So thanks Google, you got me to abandon not only Android but also Windows/Linux. Hell after the LG Nexus 5 mess, I also avoid LG from now on.
It was AirPods for me, I was fully android and chrome os (pixelbook), windows on my work machine.
Then AirPods came out and they worked with my Samsung note, but I got an iPhone at upgrade time. 5 years later and I’ve just got my second iPhone and my house is fully in the Apple ecosystem.
The “how do we?” Or “can you setup this” have effectively stopped from my wife and kids.
Compared to a pixel, they're budget phone specs missing some fundamental quality of life stuff that other phones have offered, usually for years. The fairphone 5 seems a bit closer to flagship specs, but it still clearly misses the mark and also seems priced at flagship levels. Pinephone is just a junk budget phone, although at least it's priced much lower.
As someone who used a Galaxy S3 for over a decade and has now "upgraded" to a friend's old S9, I can't understand this at all. What kind of quality of life stuff am I missing out on? I'm missing having a removable battery, but at least it has a sd card.
In summary though, it's a phone that has 1-3 year old performance metrics at nearly-flagship pricing.
I'd take a removable battery all things being equal, but it seems abundantly clear that FP5 would be making compromises in device performance compared to current flagships. That tradeoff just isn't worth it to me. Maybe it is to you.
> The fairphone 5 [...] still clearly misses the mark
How so? Comparing [1] and [2] shows the geekbench scores between the fairphone 5 and the pixel 7 are pretty similar.
> missing some fundamental quality of life stuff that other phones have offered, usually for years
I'd argue that statement is backwards: the non-mainstream phones have been offering quality of life stuff that the mainstream phones have abandoned years ago, namely user-expandable storage via microsd cards and user-replaceable battery.
For Fairphone, you're comparing against a Pixel 7 - which is a last year phone. Compare against the Galaxy S23, which has a Geekbench score that is ~50% higher than the FP5. Compared to iPhones it's even worse.
As per how they compare, reviews of the FP5 seem to say it has the following deficiencies:
* Poor display - bad brightness, which hurts outdoor usability
* Bad battery life, even considering the wimpy processor
* Underwhelming performance, which will make it feel sluggish faster
* Mediocre speaker performance
* Mediocre cameras
You're paying a whole lot, in my view, for something that has an easily replaceable battery... which is something you might do maybe once in the life of the device? If you're keeping a phone longer than 5-6 years, I suspect performance of the chipset is going to become a big issue. Additionally, with the bad battery life/performance already, it'll incentivize you to want to upgrade even sooner.
The pinephone is just not a contender. It still can't reliably wake up from sleep on an incoming call. The SMS subsystem gets 'stuck' and you stop getting messages.
Nothing wrong with the fairphone, though, I've been happy with it.
As someone still daily driving a Pixel 4A, I'm curious as to what people need from their phones that hardware from 3 years ago can't provide. Newer phones have better cameras, but otherwise it seems like they just do the same things a little bit faster.
The value argument is valid of course, but much like PCs, major phone manufacturers get a lot of their profit from bundling crapware so it's inevitable for one that doesn't to cost more.
I replaced my Pixel 2 XL only after I cracked the display twice and CalyxOS ended support. That, and a too good to refuse offer for Pixel 7 from my carrier. Still have the old one around as back up, as it works perfectly fine, as it did before.
Aside from the camera which I use less and less I'm still happy with my OnePlus 7T from 2019 which I bought second hand. I did upgrade from a OnePlus 3T which I bought new in 2016.
Given the context in the article I imagine its probably that.
> the decline in the number of active brands is coming largely from local brands
> small brands have been largely dependent on white-label devices
I'm not suggesting there haven't been some notable big historical innovators who have either completely left the market or are only shells of their former selves. LG, Nokia, HTC, were all big players who used to be innovation leaders in the space who either aren't in the market anymore or in Nokia's case just makes solid midrange phones instead of any big innovations.
But yeah, it seems like a large chunk of this drop is just local brands that stuck their own stickers on a white label phone, maybe did a little bit of localization work, stuck it in their own box and sold it as their own device. Maybe some people lost a little bit of local flavor, but I doubt much innovation was lost with most of these brands.
It’s a consequence of the maturity of the smart phone market/product. Apple’s “boring” new IPhone announcement last week (or was it two weeks ago?) is another consequence of the maturity of smart phones. There’s less and less new groundbreaking stuff to do. At the beginning before all the groundbreaking stuff was done and winners and losers decided there’s much more competition.
My wife asked what was new/changed. I said “it’s exactly he same and I like that, but it has usb c, better cameras and battery life and the screens a hit different but it’s still my exact phone setup”
Which is boring, but I kind of like it.
Before I moved from android I loved getting a new phone that was different, then I would root it if no could install custom launchers or OS’s. That was part of the fun and definitely not boring, but I actually like this kind of boring and I don’t think we will see Apple do anything crazy until they make some sort of foldable.
I will have you know that the hjafskdj phone is Amazon's Choice in the category of phones for users searching for "hjafskdj phone" in the category "Gardening" on Amazon.
lol at being stuck in xkgjd's walled garden. At least with hjafskdj I can sideload apps, but I guess some people just prefer a phone as a status symbol.
yeah, when brands purposely exist for a short enough time period that they're gone before anybody tries to make a warranty claim, there's going to be a lot of turnover
That most recent innovation in the smart phone market that was not just incremental improvements was foldable phones. It hasn't yet really taken off so it isn't clear it will become widespread.
Other than that, most everything has been very incremental (faster, longer, light, high resolution, brighter, polish) since pretty much the mid 2000s.
> The candy bar format is probably as good as it can reasonably be expected to get given our current technology.
Technology and of course human eyes, hands, and heads. There's a lower limit to the length of a phone and still have the capability of a phone which is the mean distance between peoples' ears and mouths. You also can't make a phone too small or else the screen won't be readable.
Even if you could get the iPhone 15's electronics to fit a chip the size of a grain of rice the body of the phone needs to fit a head and needs a screen for an interface. The antenna would still need to be sized such to be tuned for the right cellular frequencies.
That's not to say candy bar phones are the perfect form factor. It's just ergonomics and physics will play a part in devices no matter how compact the technology.
I guess current technology does not allow the candy bar format of 2010? I can't think of any use case I have for my 168g >6" monstrosity that I did not also do on the <120g 3.7" Defy.
Meanwhile I can't even get a new querty phone that performs well. I get that it's more niche, but this was solved years ago. I guess patent hell is partly to blame.
table stakes are much higher now. You'll find similar numbers and a similar winnowing out in PCs, from a time anyone could bang together a PC from standard parts. Michael Dell sold them out of his car trunk. That hasn't entirely disappeared but now it's a narrow space between gaming rig builders and big OEMs.
Phones will be even less forgiving of niche business models. If you can't design a titanium case, or try (and fail, and absorb the loss) to monopolize the supply of very large sapphire crystals, you can't play in phones.
Sapphire crystals are still used for the lens covers, which makes sense, because if there's any component of your phone you want to provide with extreme protection, it's the camera lens.
A screen can work fine with a crack or a dozen, but a cracked camera lens? Game over.
Two reasons: large, phone sized sheets of sapphire are difficult to manufacture and be optically clear. Also, sapphire is more brittle than glass... so despite scratching less easily, it's much much more likely to shatter if you drop a phone. Glass, as much as it has deficiency, is a compromise inbetween. And it's way cheaper, to boot.
growing a sapphire crystal is difficult, and like silicon chips, the bigger the surface area, the chances of defects goes up exponentially. Additionaly, ading $200-300 to the BOM to make your product last longer is a bad idea, since each broken screen is usually a sale or a $500 repair bill. simple economics.
I don't think this really matters since they all just ran Android. (and probably never updated it) A few brands might be useful for consumer choice and to keep prices low, but as long as they're all Android the choices don't really amount to much.
I'm just as in pain that we lost so many cpu makers. I don't even remember who used to be making chips. It feels like we are down to so few.
Ignore Apple entirely (since you can't make a phone with that chip) and Qualcomm and MediaTek are probably make up significantly >50% of the market. Samsung and who else make buyable chips?
More to the point of this submission, isn't it amazing how hard it is to get a phone smaller than 5.9" diagonal? It just isn't done. The market itself has set, has picked a couple things it wants to do, and doesn't try anything else.
There are more, but those are the ones off the top of my head. Not all of these companies had their own foundries, by the way. Cyrix just designed the chips, they were fabbed somewhere else.
Amazon: "We're talking top brands here, like FLORGOO, REMPLOW, BARBENTRON, ZOLIMIO"
Customer: "Those really dont sound like real companies, Amazon"
Amazon: "But they kindof do though, you can see how those might be company names"
Customer: "I guess?"
(from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30 )