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Chapter 2657 Friendly Nations' Surprise

Just as the Tianchao No. 1 was selling like hotcakes in the market, a dozen senior executives sat around a long table in a conference room at Nokia's Finnish headquarters.

In front of each person was a Tianchao No. 1, which had been urgently purchased. Its silver-gray metal casing gleamed coldly under the conference room's overhead lights, and next to it were several screwdrivers and pry bars for disassembling the machine.

The meeting was chaired by the vice president of Nokia's hardware R&D department, a Finn who had worked in the mobile phone industry for nearly twenty years.

The vice president picked up the Tianchao No. 1 in front of him, weighed it in his hand, but said nothing.

In fact, it wasn't just the vice president who was speechless; no one in the entire conference room spoke, and everyone's expression was the same—frowning.

The vice president turned the Tianchao No. 1 over and looked at the back cover.

He found that the seam between the back cover and the body was almost invisible, and after touching it with his hand, he couldn't find any place to touch it.

He picked up the screwdriver on the table and tried to insert the tip into the gap between the back cover and the body.

The moment the knife tip was inserted, before any force could be applied, the entire phone screen suddenly went black.

The image on the screen vanished instantly, all the keypad lights went out, and the phone became a heavy, lifeless brick.

The vice president paused for a moment, pulled out the screwdriver, and pressed the power button again.

no response.

I pressed and held it for a few more seconds.

Still no response.

"Damn it! It must be a random malfunction. It seems the quality of Chinese mobile phones is just so-so," the vice president said in Finnish.

Then they put the first one aside, picked up the second one, and replaced it with a thinner pry bar.

The screen went black again as soon as the pry bar was inserted into the gap.

The second one was thus turned into a brick.

The dozen or so people in the conference room immediately looked at each other in bewilderment.

Someone muttered quietly in Finnish, "Does this thing have a self-destruct mechanism?"

The vice president put down the crowbar, took off his glasses, wiped them, and put them back on.

He glanced at the few remaining Tianchao No. 1 units on the table, then at the screwdriver beside him: "Don't disassemble them yet. Call China and have them order another batch. Buy a few more this time."

“Okay, Mr. Carl.”

……

A similar scene unfolded almost simultaneously at the R&D centers of Motorola, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson.

The technical departments of various international mobile phone giants urgently purchased a large number of Tianchao No.1 phones through their respective China offices. The phones were neatly stacked on the test benches, with a whole row of disassembly tools on them.

Various types of screwdrivers, pry bars, heat guns, suction cups, tweezers, and even ultrasonic cutters specifically designed for removing phone casings.

The first thing they need to verify is the issue of plagiarism.

According to the conventional logic of Western industry, it is impossible for Chinese companies to develop such advanced mobile phones in such a short period of time; the only possibility is plagiarism.

For example, they copy Nokia's hardware design, Motorola's antenna solution, and Samsung's screen technology, putting together components from several companies, changing the casing, and calling it their own.

This has happened before, and it has even become the norm in China's mobile phone industry.

In the past, they mostly chose to turn a blind eye, since there was no way to threaten them and that garbage could not possibly be sold on the international market.

However, today's Tianchao Electronics is completely different, and it immediately posed a threat to these tech giants.

Dozens of top engineers formed a joint technical team to scan the circuit board of Tianchao No. 1 under a high-powered microscope, compare and analyze the operating system code line by line, and conduct radiation pattern mapping of the antenna design in an anechoic chamber.

After several weeks of continuous hard work, dozens of technical analysis reports were compiled and placed on a conference table.

Nokia's chief hardware engineer opened the report, read a few pages, but remained silent.

The Motorola antenna expert sat opposite him, holding his report, his brow furrowing more and more as he turned to the last few pages.

Samsung's head of screen technology stood up, walked to the whiteboard, picked up a marker as if to draw something, but put it down after a few seconds.

The reports all agree that the baseband chip architecture of Tianchao No. 1 is different from any known product on the market.

It wasn't from Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, or STMicroelectronics; it was a completely new design they had never seen before.

The underlying code of the operating system does not overlap with any line of Symbian or Windows CE.

No trace of patent infringement can be found in the overall hardware design.

Dozens of worldly-wise eyes stared at the report in the conference room, and no one uttered a word for a long time.

An engineer took off his goggles, rubbed his eyes, and said to his colleague next to him, "Either we missed something, or they really did build something from scratch."

"..." The colleague didn't respond, because he didn't know what to say either.

……

After confirming that there was no plagiarism, they immediately turned to the second direction: disassembling the device to analyze the parts supply chain.

Since you can't copy it, then check which supplier you're using, whose screen, battery, and memory chip it is.

Find these suppliers and use them to strangle you.

They've done this many times in other markets.

As a result, the screwdrivers and pry bars were all rendered useless by Tianchao No. 1.

This phone features a unibody design with no exposed screw holes. The clips between the back cover and the body fit together so tightly that you can't even fit a piece of paper inside.

A special pressure tool is required to force disassembly, and once the force on the outer shell exceeds a certain extremely precise threshold, the micro-sensors hidden inside the device will immediately trigger the protection mechanism.

The encryption chip on the motherboard detected the unauthorized intrusion and locked the phone immediately. The screen went black instantly, all data was automatically erased, and the entire phone became a heavy, unusable brick.

Samsung engineers fixed the Tianchao No. 1 on the workbench, picked up a heat gun, and aimed it at the edge of the back cover to soften the glue.

The temperature was rising little by little, and he stared at the thermometer, his hand steady.

The screen went black as soon as the temperature reached the preset point.

Helplessly, I turned off the heat gun and cursed, "Damn it."

Sony Ericsson engineers took a different approach, using an ultrasonic cutter to try and cut the casing open from the side.

The blade had barely made a cut when a soft click came from inside the machine, and the screen went black. The only option was to stop the machine, remove the blade, and stare at the now-bricked Tianchao No. 1 for a long time.

……

In the laboratory at Nokia headquarters, the vice president stood next to the experimental table, with a whole row of dismantled Tianchao No. 1s in front of him.

He picked up the instruction manual from Tianchao Electronics, turned to the page on after-sales terms, read it, and then handed the manual to the legal director next to him. "David, what do you think?"

The legal director took it and glanced at it, then looked up and said, "Mr. Carl, Tianchao Electronics' after-sales terms are very clear: any damage to the equipment caused by violent disassembly will not be covered by warranty, nor will they accept replacements. In other words, if you've disassembled it, they won't acknowledge the phone."

The vice president said, "In other words, every time we dismantle one, we lose two hundred euros."

The legal director said, "Yes. And their price is only two hundred euros. Even if we damage dozens of units, the cost is only a few thousand euros. But to figure out what chips and encryption technologies are used inside, this number is far from enough. We calculated that if we were to reverse engineer the motherboard structure, chip model, and encryption mechanism, we would conservatively estimate that we would have to destroy hundreds or even thousands of machines."

The vice president paused for a few seconds. "A few hundred units would only amount to tens of thousands of euros, not a huge sum. The problem is, even if we dismantle a thousand units, can we guarantee we can get them right?"

"..." No one answered him.

……

The same situation is playing out in other major companies as well, who all feel quite frustrated and helpless when faced with Tianchao No.1.

However, these dismantling teams were not satisfied and brought in more precise industrial equipment and more expensive instruments.

Motorola borrowed an X-ray machine from the lab, hoping to scan the internal structure without disassembling the machine.

When the X-ray machine is turned on, the rays penetrate the metal casing and hit the circuit board inside, and an image begins to form on the screen.

However, the critical parts of the motherboard were covered with a layer of gray substance, and the scanned image was blurry, making it impossible to see the chip model.

The engineer operating the X-ray machine zoomed in on the image again and again, but it was still blurry.

Then he turned to his colleague and said, "Shit! They added X-ray shielding material to the motherboard. X-rays can't penetrate it at all."

My colleague leaned over and looked at the screen. "What? A 200-euro phone with X-ray shielding?"

"Correct."

"Are they crazy?"

The engineer pointed to the blurry gray area on the screen, "I don't know if it's crazy or not, but they added it anyway."

……

Nokia brought in several top encryption system experts to try and bypass the encryption lock by exploiting a software vulnerability.

The experts connected Tianchao No. 1 to a computer and tried to inject code through various debugging interfaces, which took them several days.

Someone attempted to establish a data connection through the charging port, but the system rejected it.

Someone attempted to inject commands through the SIM card slot, but the attempt was blocked by the firewall.

Someone tried to find a buffer overflow vulnerability by examining the SMS protocol stack, and after several sleepless nights, they finally discovered that the protocol stack code was written flawlessly.

The lead expert wrote a report with a brief conclusion: the security of this encryption system reached the highest level among current commercial products.

Surprisingly, a personal note was added at the end of the report: "With our current technical means, the success rate of completing the disassembly and analysis without triggering the self-destruct mechanism is extremely low. It is recommended to find other ways to obtain technical information."

After several rounds of trouble, they destroyed dozens of Tianchao No. 1s.

The disassembled cell phones lay silently on the lab bench, their lifeless screens reflecting the cold light overhead.

On a dozen or so experimental tables, dozens of Tianchao No. 1 machines, now reduced to bricks, were neatly arranged. Some had their back covers pried open, some had been heated with a hot air gun, and some had a thin slit cut into their side by an ultrasonic scalpel, but none of them had ever been successfully disassembled.

……

In the laboratory at Nokia headquarters.

The vice president stood in front of the row of lifeless phones, picked one up, and looked at it.

There is a shallow scratch on the back cover where it was pried open with a screwdriver, but the rest of the cover is intact.

The phone is still quite heavy, and the aluminum alloy casing still has a cool feel under the light, but this phone will never light up again.

The vice president put the phone back on the table and said to the engineer next to him, "Each one costs 1,999 yuan, which is a little over 200 euros. A 200-euro phone uses encryption technology that even 2,000-euro phones might not have. How did they manage to keep the cost down to this level?"

The engineer shook his head. "That's what I can't understand the most. The cost of the encryption chip itself is not low. Add to that the X-ray shielding material, the self-destruct trigger mechanism, the unibody design... Each of these technologies is not cheap on its own. They only sell for two hundred euros. Either their cost control is far superior to ours, or they simply don't care about the initial profit."

The vice president took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. "There's another possibility... they never intended to make money from selling hardware in the first place. You've seen their after-sales policy: a three-month replacement guarantee, a two-year replacement at half price, and the price is only half that of our flagship phone. This strategy isn't about making money; it's about seizing market share."

The engineer paused for a few seconds, then said, "If their goal was to seize market share, then they have succeeded. Our sales in China declined by 40% last quarter."

The vice president put his glasses back on, looked at the row of Tianchao No. 1 phones on the table that had turned into bricks, and said, "Tell headquarters that we need to reassess our strategy for the Chinese market. All previous plans are scrapped."

……

Technical reports from Nokia and Motorola circulated among several industry giants, and the conclusions were all the same:

Tianchao No. 1 did not copy any existing patents, and it cannot be disassembled for research.

These two conclusions naturally silenced everyone.

But after the silence came not abandonment, but another, more sinister plan.

After several transoceanic conference calls, the top executives of the major companies quickly reached a tacit understanding.

There was no written record of the phone call, no meeting minutes, and no email trace.

But the meaning is very clear: to take the unorthodox path of law and public opinion.

Since they can't beat them technically or make a breakthrough in commercial intelligence, they can only use litigation to drag Tianchao Electronics down.

Sometimes evidence doesn't matter, and neither does winning or losing.

If you drag the other party into a legal battle for several years, their expansion will slow down, their brand image will be labeled as a "copycat," and their steps to enter the international market will be hindered.

This is what it means to use the law as a weapon and public opinion as bullets.

They've used this tactic more than once in the past few decades.

Although it seems particularly shameless, it has proven to be a tried and true method.

They used it when Japanese companies were rising to prominence; they used it when South Korean companies were rising to prominence.

I just didn't expect that it would be the turn of Chinese companies so soon.

...(End of this chapter)