Hubby and Wifey's Blog

With the increasingly alarming rate at which FAKE "NOKLA" mobile phones are being produced and bought by unsuspecting innocent individuals, I thought I'd give some quick tips on how to spot a fake "nokLa" phone from the original.

A lot of content on this topic flood the net, but a good number of them are outdated now and no longer work, as the wack chinese manufacturers are perfecting their art of mimicry of nokia phones. These are 10 working tips help bust the fakes. Watch out for:

1. The battery should have a hologram that gives the nokia hand shake logo, when tilted to an angle, and the enhancement word on the other angle. Also on looking at it from four different angles, you should see 1, 2, 3 and 4 dots respectively slightly behind the circle around the 'nokia' inscription.

2. The start-up tone and hand-shaking nokia logo is quite distorted on coming on. Observe it with a sure nokia mobile phone to accurately note this.

3. The start-up time of the fakes are too rapid than usual. Most of them boot completely under 6 seconds, while the original normally do so under 12-30 secs. (depending on available RAM space)


4. The user interface looks amateurish, usually featuring harsh colours and wack screen papers. Also looking at the music player would tell you something.

5. The key pad buttons are generally looking wack, too hard to the touch of the fingers and lack proper symmetry. You would see some buttons popping over the others.

6. The lowest part of the LCD screen usually feature a row of small icons, usually white in colour. This is common with the N-series fakes.

7. The camera shots of a fake 5.0 mega pixels "NokLa" phone would usually be nothing to write home about. They would usually be blurred, have some light lines across and would poorly pick colours. Their best would look like a photo shot of a VGA camera.

8. The phones are unusually sold at rudiculously cheap prices.

9. If you see an odd coloured nokia phone, then raise an eyebrow. A set of original phone would usually posses standard colours. An orange or red on a nokia E61? Hmmnn...

10. Check the weight if it is lighter than a phone should be. Also try your luck on looking for smart spellings like 'nokLa', 'mokia'...also look for lightly engraved bluetooth or other odd logos. Nokia is too responsibly and matured to use a phone's body as a billboard for writting thrash. The most you should see on a nokia phone would be "nokia", then maybe the model e.g E71.

Together with the 10 tips, here is a note to help prevent you from being deceived to buying a fake nokia phone:

*Never buy any nokia mobile from auction sites or other unofficial sources on the net. You have no control over what you get; you can be shipped a "NokLa" instead of the Nokia you saw displayed online

*If you want to get a particular model of phone that you know of, then browse the internet and print out its full details. Get picture shots of the phone on a paper before going to the stores so you could compare fairly.......