China Source Chinavasion: Scam China Suppliers Offering ‘IPads’ Should be Avoided

So with the insatiable demand surrounding the iPad now there must be at least a handful of resellers scouring places like Alibaba and Aliexpress looking for discount Apple iPads that they can sell through their own networks for a hefty fee.

But why is there so much buzz surrounding the iPad? After all it’s not like we haven’t seen this techology before.

Whether or not the iPad is an oversized smart phone or an undersized laptop (though calling a device with a 9.7″ screen an undersized laptop does prove to be a stretch of the imagination) is not even the issue. Slate computing has been around since 2001 or 2007 depending on whether you are referring to the larger tablet computer or the smaller MID.

It could also be argued that the current batch of eBooks essentially does the same job.

Paul Saffo, a writer and technology forecaster in Silicon Valley and visiting scholar at Stanford University probably put it best with his comment on a PBS talk show (pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june10/ipad_04-05.html):

What they have done is, they have legitimated a whole new space of a device…

The important thing is that it’s Apple doing the introduction. And this is a company that has lots of true believers, because they have a track record of delivering truly new things.

Whether they are true believers or sheeple is something best left up to the fanboys to debate but it is undoubtable that there is a lot of buzz surrounding the Apple iPad.

With the iPad going for a starting price of 499USD, between 600,000 and 700,000 being sold in the first day and a search over Alibaba revealling ‘iPad’ models for between US$100 and US$300 you might be forgiven for thinking that this is the opening of an eBay resellers’ goldmine.

A quick look over the wide variation in iPad models though very quickly reveal the truth.

IPads do not run off an Intel Atom chip nor do they have a 160GB memory. The screen size is 9.7 inches, not 10 inches, not 8 inches or any other variation and it does not come with a camera.

Just for clarification these are the iPad specifications which have been taken directly from the iPod product page

• Physical Dimensions
  • Height: 9.56 inches (242.8 mm)
  • Width: 7.47 inches (189.7 mm)
  • Depth: 0.5 inch (13.4 mm)
  • Weight:
    • 1.5 pounds (0.68 kg) Wi-Fi model;
    • 1.6 pounds (0.73 kg) Wi-Fi + 3G model
• 9.7-inch widescreen Multi-Touch display
• 1024-by-768-pixel resolution
• Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g/n)
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR technology
• UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100 MHz) (WiFi + 3G model)
• GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz) (WiFi + 3G model)
• 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash drive
• 1GHz Apple A4 Chip
• Audio formats supported:
  • HE-AAC (V1)
  • AAC (16 to 320 Kbps)
  • Protected AAC (from iTunes Store)
  • MP3
  • AIFF
  • WAV
• Video Formats
  • H.264 video
  • MPEG-4
  • Motion JPEG (M-JPEG)
• Doc Files Compatibility
  • jpg
  • tiff
  • gif
  • doc, docx
  • htm, html
  • pdf
  • ppt, pptx
  • txt
  • rtf
  • vcf
  • xls, xlsx
• Languages
  • English
  • French
  • German
  • Japanese
  • Dutch
  • Italian
  • Spanish
  • Simplified Chinese
  • Russian
• Box Contents
  • iPad
  • Dock Connector to USB Cable
  • 10W USB Power Adapter
  • Documentation

But even if the specifications match up you’re not exactly home and hosed with a trustable supplier.

The truth of the matter is that, for people looking to source cheap iPads, they will probably need to go through Apple.

While these products probably, but aren’t necessarily bad (and may be adequate slate computers in their own right) they aren’t going to be Apple iPads.

And if a manufacturer is prepared to scam you by saying that their product is someone elses what else are they trying to do?

If you’ve dealt with Chinavasion you’ll know that scam isn’t our vocabulary and how sad we are that such scams are going on within the industry. So we urge resellers to take care, support reputable China wholesale companies like Chinavasion, scam companies shouldn’t profit from their misrepresentations.