Nokia takes action against Chinese
Cloners
3rd July 2006
Last week, Nokia announced
that it was to take legal action against two related
Chinese manufacturers of mobile handsets, including
Telsda.
The Chinese market is growing very rapidly, and much
of this expansion is being fuelled by Chinese manufacturers
rather than imported handsets.
Telsda is an interesting case in point.
It's a rapidly growing Chinese company, but unlike better
known manufacturers such as Haier, much of Telsda's
range appears to be a blatant copy of handsets made
by big name manufacturers.
 Telsda
A317
|
 Telsda
E218
|
 Telsda
SG4500
|
 Telsda
T218
|
 Telsda
T607
|
 Telsda
TS9
|
 Nokia
7260
|
 Sony
Ericsson K700i
|
 Motorola
RAZR V3i
|
 Samsung
D500
|
 Samsung
E720
|
 Samsung
E330
|
While the Telsda handsets aren't exact
copies, you can see that the likeness is uncanny. In
our opinion, it's clear that Telsda have made some small
cosmetic changes while at the same time leaving in distinctive
styling details that give the game away.
Although not all Telsda handsets are
such blatant copies, the Telsda A317 is clearly designed
to be almost identical to the Nokia 7260. There's no
way that Telsda could have come up with a design like
that by accident.
To be fair, Telsda are not the only
company who are involved in this type of activity, and
Telsda are at least not trying to pass the handsets
off as the genuine article, unlike some other Far Eastern
manufacturers who actually make even more convincing
big brand handsets complete with a fake "Nokia",
"Samsung", "Sony Ericsson" or
"Motorola" label.
We believe that Nokia's case against
Telsda on the A317 is straightforward. It remains to
be seen just how good the Chinese legal system is at
protecting intellectual property and industrial design.
|