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.

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.