Apparently the reason why you’ll see very many people owning seemingly ‘high end’ flagship devices from our country Kenya is “peeps be buying chinku phones”.
The common and popular brands Infinix and Tecno have flooded the Kenyan market making the counterfeiters hard at work, pumping in the fakes.
It’s not hard to spot a fake by an average consumer who hopefully has experience using genuine devices. The give aways usually start on the screen. Devices claiming to have UHD / FHD displays ending up looking so plasticky.
Let’s begin with the juicy technicals, this week I got two devices. An infinix X657 and a Tecno F2. The infinix device had the following specifications if you view them from the device information options in the android settings ;
- 32GB internal memory
- 2 Gigs of RAM, running on android version 9. All these are fake properties
Running the below command
adb shell getprop ro.build.version.release
gives us the correct device properties
The Tecno device also had fake specifications in the os;
8 GB internal memory
1 GB of RAM
running on android version 6. The original device runs android 7.0 (Nougat)
Executing
adb shell du
adb shell df
shows the storage properties
These kind of devices are all over the market and very hard to detect it’s flaws from unexperienced consumers.
When buying an expensive looking device, it shouldn’t be cheap 😂 Stay educated !