Originally Posted By: JGmazda
Originally Posted By: dlayman
Originally Posted By: DBMaster
Originally Posted By: dlayman
I personally would not purchase a BLU phone for quality reasons. They simply purchase the cheapest of the cheap Chinese OEM phones (not brands you may have heard of like Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo, or Alcatel), and rebadge them. I expect the quality to be quite poor on these. And these phones were never originally meant to be released to the US market,
IIRC the company (Bold Like Us) is based in Miami and originally intended the phone brand for Latin American countries. Some of them get very good reviews online, but like you, I am a bit leery when the prices are TOO low.
Yes BLU is a Miami-based American company, specializing in rebranding the cheapest of the cheap no-name Chinese phones. I don't know about the Latin American part. Likely Blu was as duped by this as anybody, but they might have expected as much. A lot of products get good reviews because they function when fresh out of the box (like people who write glowing reviews of tires with 100 miles on them). Android is as much to blame as anybody in this. These devices should not have passed licensing. Obviously they must be relying on the "good faith" of the cell phone suppliers, rather than doing actual testing, like too many regulatory bodies do. Or else they just aren't very good at it. People seem to think Samsung, LG, Blackberry, Apple are safe and secure, but I wouldn't bet on any of it.
Yes, good comments. I wonder why these "passed" originally and does it really take a private testing company to vet these devices? With everything going on in the cyber-world, one would think our country would really be scrutinizing this.
I think Android is more interested in collecting licensing fees than in doing thorough testing to protect their customers. Again, being open sourced, Android is always going to be more susceptible to back door exploits. Unfortunately as is usually the case the hackers tend to be a step ahead of the good guys. The US is WAY behind in the cyber security war. Heck, the Democratic party couldn't even keep its data secure from Russian hackers. Major governmental and institutional systems remain vulnerable. I think individual devices are a low priority. There's a reason why governmental officials have always relied on Blackberry. Whether that remains the case now that Blackberries run Android, although supposedly with enhanced security, on Chinese OEM phones I'm not sure. The most recent BlackBerry release is a rebadged inexpensive Alcatel Chinese phone, again with supposedly enhanced security. However if Spyware is baked into the root of the phone, who knows if BlackBerry can make it secure. I think the best bet is to find a way to see if there is unauthorized data being sent from your phone. There are apps to do this, although the name escapes me at the moment. But on the converse this app requires extensive phone permissions although it does come from a "reputable source". I can go back and look into the app if you are interested. It also requires a download to your PC in order to do the analysis. Despite how bleak I make it sound, there have been very few reports of any damage being done to individual users. I think breaching bigger targets, such as banks, large department stores, and even government databases is a higher priority.
