M A C V A Y S I A

Last month Leen and I bought new mobile phones. There’s a small shop in the Tesco complex in Kajang that was offering really good deals so we said what the heck and bought a phone each. Leen bought a Nokia 6280 and I went with a Nokia 3230. All was well, until Leen started having minor issues with her phone. The battery didn’t last very long, the slider wasn’t very smooth, plus a couple of tiny issues I can’t remember. She took the phone to a shop and the guy there told her it wasn’t a genuine Nokia phone. Then she went to Nokia and the people there told her the same thing. They showed her how to tell whether it’s genuine (mainly looking for the Z-Tron label inside the back or something like that) and told her the phone she had was basically a cheap knockoff.

Needless to say she was a bit miffed. So was I after I took a look inside the back of my phone. Miffed would be quite an understatement, actually. We went straight to the little shop in the Tesco complex. I marched up to the counter, dropped the phones—packed neatly back into their boxes—in front of the workers, and told them I wanted two real phones. They were flabbergasted. They said they only sold real phones, not fakes. They said that while the phones they sell are not ‘genuine’ Nokia phones, they are not fakes either. Yes, that’s what they said. They said the phones are called ‘AP phones’ and are basically the real deal except they’re put together locally so they can be sold at a lower price, kind of like how Peugeot uses Naza to manufacture their cars in Malaysia.

I’m not quite sure what to make of all this. First of all, if the phones had sported a ‘local’ brand name, I wouldn’t have bought them. Nor would I have bought them if the salesperson had mentioned they weren’t genuine Nokia phones. I’ve lived in China, I know how crappy fakes are. When I went to the shop the other night, the salespeople told me I should have known the phones were AP phones, because everyone else knows. Is that true? I mean, if I go to Petaling Street or Damansara Uptown, I know full well that anything with a brand name on it is a cheap knock-off. But if I’m in a supposedly reputable shop and I buy a brand-new phone that comes complete with the box and all the accessories and all that, I would expect that phone to be genuine. According to the salespeople, with whom I was losing more an more patience with each passing minute, practically every shop that sells new mobile phones is actually selling AP phones, with only a few selling the genuine article.

I was quite angry and made that quite apparent to the salespeople. I told them I wanted genuine phones, and of course they told me I’d have to add a few hundred ringgit. I said no, because I had thought they were selling me genuine phones in the first place, and now I wanted what I had paid for. Things started to get ugly and they had to phone their boss several times. We left there with the same AP phones and paid a visit to the boss in his other shop in downtown Kajang. He swore there was nothing wrong with AP phones, using the Naza example again, blah blah blah. He managed to diffuse my anger a bit by giving us new batteries and chargers, but he wasn’t willing to budge an inch on my demand for ‘real’ Nokia phones unless I added several hundred ringgit. We left with our phones but told him we’d be back if we found out we’d been ripped off.

So we still have those same AP phones. They seem to be OK, and mine especially has always worked like a charm (aside from the occasional software glitch that these phones seem to have, if I can believe most of the reviews I’ve read). The phones even came with warranties, although they’re only covered by the company we bought them from, not Nokia itself. Actually, I like my phone. For now.

My question is: what’s up with AP phones? Are they legal? Have I been ripped off? Considering we got the phones cheap, I’d be inclined to say no—if not for the fact that what we got wasn’t what we thought we were buying. If there’s nothing dodgy about the phones, I’ll feel a little guilty because I was teetering dangerously close to the edge of asshole territory in my conversation with the salespeople at that shop. However, if these AP phones are in fact a big rip-off, I’ll have no qualms about going back to the shop owner and acting like a complete asshole.

So can anybody shed some light on this for me?