On 2019-05-31 11:29 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
For whatever reason, few RoC companies have brands that are valuable in North America. I'm old enough that I remember that being true of Japanese brands. I think I first heard of Sharp in 1965 on a visit to Hong Kong. In Japan, on that same trip, I first heard of the Japanese car brands that became ubiquitous in North America a few years later.
Something manufactured in China with a "Motorola" brand (owned by Lenovo, an RoC company) may seem like a safer bet than one with a "Umidigi" or "Doogee" brand. Remember when Motorola was a US company? When they had their own important microprocessors (6800, 68000, etc.)?
Too many Chinese products that have interested me have been "fire and forget": no support, no updates. If you look at single-board computers (think Raspberry Pi), there are many Chinese competitors that are technically superior until you look at these issues.
The first time I recall hearing about Sharp was on a cassette deck I bought in the early 70s, IIRC. As for brands, I go with Lenovo ThinkPads. This is in part because I used to work for IBM and most of my work was on ThinkPads, but also the ThinkPad line just seems to be better quality than the regular Lenovo products. Also, if it doesn't have a TrackPoint, I'm not interested. BTW, a friend bought a Lenovo, not ThinkPad, and it had that horrible English/French keyboard, that wasn't compatible with either the original English or French keyboards. She soon returned it for that reason.