When a company decides to sell its phones to a specific market, it'll generally make sure that the phone has the hardware support (and regulatory certification) for most, if not all, of the bands used in that target market. In China, the story is similar, just with LTE bands 3, 39, 40, and 41. Some carriers may not use all three, and some may have an extra secondary band or two, but for the most part, these are the LTE bands you'll see in Europe. As an example of regional band usage, countries in or near the European Union tend to use LTE bands 3, 7, and 20. Cellular BandsĪnyway, back to cellular bands. While the same principles generally apply to 2G, 3G, and 5G, the first two are currently being phased out globally, while the latter is still in its initial messy rollout. Which brings me to my next point.įor this article, I'm only going to be talking about LTE. To some people, that risk might be worth it, but not to most, especially if the phone doesn't even officially work as a phone in the United States. That's a long way of saying that there's risk involved with buying from unofficial sellers. I ended up getting the Filipino variant of the Galaxy A51, which didn't have NFC support, but I could've just as easily gotten the United Kingdom variant, which does have NFC. The description was copied verbatim from GSMArena, including the part where NFC support varies by region. For example, I bought an imported Galaxy A51 a while back, which I later returned. I've also run into the issue of not knowing where the device is from until I get it. Personally, when I've bought an overseas phone, I've read vague product descriptions that end up not quite matching the device I actually receive. And that $145 comes after the sale and some new-user discounts. Shipping time is a month, shipping costs $10.51, there will be tax on top of this, and the phone itself is supposed to retail for $129. $145 is about the cheapest I can find the Poco M3 on AliExpress. You can be reasonably sure a highly-rated seller is going to give you what you wanted, but it's nowhere near as certain as it is with an official purchase. That doesn't really apply to unofficial sellers. If you bought the device new, it'll come to you sealed and in good condition. If you buy directly from a company or an authorized seller, you have a reasonable guarantee that you'll get what you paid for. In the end, that hypothetical $200 phone could end up selling for $300 or even $400.Īnd then there's the risk involved with buying from a third-party. And that's not including the seller's own profit margins. Thanks to that lack of economies of scale, these sellers have to mark up the price slightly (or more than slightly if they're daring), just to cover the costs of handling the import. But those sellers don't have the same distribution scale as Realme does, and they still have to deal with the same regulations that Realme would if it sold to the United States officially. If I went on eBay or AliExpress and searched up that hypothetical Realme phone, I'd probably find plenty of listings for it, all shipping to the United States, and all from unofficial sources. So, it has to be done unofficially, through third-party sellers. There's no large-scale supply chain set up to get the latest Realme with a 4K display and 144Hz refresh rate that costs $200 to this country. But, they'd also take care of all the logistics of shipping devices to the United States and work any associated costs into their budgets and the prices of the different devices.īut those brands don't officially sell devices in the United States. If the good-value brands like Xiaomi and OPPO/Realme officially sold their products in the United States, well, this article wouldn't exist. We have our own set of shipping regulations and associated costs. Different countries and regions have different regulations on what can be imported and exported, along with different fees and taxes. There's a lot involved here, especially if the phone is crossing national borders. The problem with logisticsįirst up, let's talk import logistics: What it takes to get a phone from point A to point B. Unfortunately, it isn't always a good idea to import a phone to the U.S.
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