Coolpad E230 becomes erm… cool

If you have been following my posts, you will know that I am a big fan of Chinese phones. But there is an elephant in the room. Not every phone is like the Xiaomi M1 and it is just that some Chinese phones are…, well frankly pretty poor….

Or are they?Imagine a particularly terrible Chinese mobile phone. Its not hard and perhaps you might be spoilt for choice. Let me help you. Here is one:

It is rather optimistically called the “Coolpad E230” Cool it aint but it was cheap. Coolpad have gone on to make rather better offerings but this wasn’t their finest moment. Just for the record its specifications were:

• Internet Browser
• 2.6″ TFT Touch Screen
• 1.3 Mega Pixel Camera
• FM Radio+Recording
• Music Player
• Video and Voice Recorder
• Expandable Memory up to 4 G
•  Ebook Reader
• 1100 mAh Li-ion Battery
• USB 2.0
• Bluetooth 2.0

All this for about £70 or $110 which is about the only positive. It even got terrible reviews in China. Like a lot of cheap Chinese phones, it runs on a Symbian like Java based operating system. My iPhone 3g knockoff uses the same. It is functional but you can’t do much else with it other than what has already been pre installed.

Well that was what the  script said but Baidu (China’s main search engine) recently highlighted a thread where a guy thought different. The thread (in Chinese) can be read here. Essentially, he decided that it should be converted from Java to Android. I don’t know how he did it but the results speak for themselves:

After:

So now, of course, I want one. Thanks to J for the heads up.