Message Hair

After some excellent pre-sales advice about what my next mobile device should be, I went looking around for good prices on a Nokia N95.

I immediately started to notice an odd trend: brand new the N95 sells for over $600. But I found it for sale on eBay, and through Froogle for much less — $300 to $400. All of the cheap phones had something else in common: the same cut-and-pasted descriptive text about the device, including this feature list:

Other functions: MP3 functionses, MP4 functionses, don`t need to lift to converse, message hair, recording function, WAP function, handwritten importation, handwritten keyboard importation, blue tooth function, GPRS download, the MMS colorful message, memory expand, single card list treat, converse double to recording, the IP stir number, calculator, healthy management

I’m fairly confident that “message hair” is not a standard N95 feature (although I would love a phone with that ability, whatever that ability actually is). And then I read the smaller print on several of the ads and found:

This is a copy of the Nokia N95.

It appears that these cheap phones are not, in fact, actual Nokia N95 phones, but rather phones “inspired by” the N95. Not that you’d ever know that unless you read carefully. Caveat emptor.