THL Review – Some Face Effort Please
It’s often that people are outraged at the lack of QC and issues with China brands such as customer support.
Things have gotten much better in the actual quality of phones produced – a great example of this is the THL T11 which has enough goodness in it that you truly couldn’t expect anything more from a $220 phone. When it comes to face though, THL has a ways to go to live up to the standards of mainstream popular brand phones.
Their English website is, to put it mildly – crap. The English translations on their English support blog are only the start. According to THL, this is why we like Android phones –
“Nowdays, android mobile phone are becoming a growing number of common in marketplace, additional far more, in the minimal end market, you can find also several android cell phone could be picked by customers.”
I love this part – THL Support
The download section at THL
The English THL favicon
My purpose is not to laugh at them, though it is somewhat laughable. Actually as I started this article, I thought I’d be supporting their lack of efforts, but on 2nd thought – I can’t, as it’s truly unacceptable. If you’re going to market to English speaking customers and the Western world, at an absolute minimum show a little class by populating your website with a proper firmware download and support area for the phones you release.
THL, if you’re going to make blog entries in English and aren’t going to use a native speaker for translation, at the very least hire native Chinese who have been properly educated and can write semi-legible English. And for the love of hell, put up a favicon.
Don’t get me wrong, anybody who doesn’t know the industry needs to know that THL makes great China brand MTK phones. Their general QC and recent release of the great THL T11 with 1900MHz WCDMA support is a milestone.
Regarding the customer support otherwise, this is understandable. These companies are not making big profits. The China brands we know and sometimes love wouldn’t exist if they offered top notch customer support. So something has to give and one of, if not the most expensive aspect of running a business is customer support.
Truth be told, the majority of customer support should be coming at the retail level from the shops who sold you your phone (an entirely different article). A manufacturer is still responsible for some things though. The issues on THL’s website – no favicon, lack of proper downloads and support information, and terribly translated blog posts could be corrected in a day. Let’s pull it together THL. At least put on enough of a game face to match your very nice releases – the THL W200S and THL T11.
could not agree more.
for most of the smaller, and even some of the larger Chinese phone brands, their web pages are at best laughable.
i don’t think it can be that expensive for them to have someone translate their pages into proper or at least readable english.
Heck, even Google translate does a better job most of the time to convert their original chinese text into something you can actually understand.
But i have to admit, this is not only true for chinese brands, i sometimes have to shake my head in disbelief when i read the “english” translation of some European sites as well.
not to mention numerous manuals that come with all kind of daily use products, if you spend some time to actually read them you get some good laughs out of them too.
This is so alien to me. I couldn’t imagine launching a product aimed at a certain locale and not get a professional or native speaker to do the marketing lingo. We bought some beautifully packaged cookies the other day that said ‘Chocolate Ship’ cookies — which would have been quite clever if they were chocolate chip cookies in the form of ships, but alas they were just your standard round cookies. Really amazing.
Was shopping for watches at the official international Seiko website couple days back. There’s no favicon! These guys are selling $4000 dollar watches and can’t be bothered to put a favicon on their site. It’s unreal.