Questions have been raised about the “Vietnamese content ratio” in BPhone as Vietnamese users have discovered that foreign technology has been used. 

“There is no reason for the developer to use Chinese technology for BPhone, the smartphone model described as ‘purely Vietnamese’ and “the best in the world in terms of security,” a Vietnamese user wrote on a telecom forum.

The discovery that BPhone used Chinese positioning technology has once again raised doubts about the Vietnamese origin of the product. 

In fact, Vietnamese always look at “purely Vietnamese” products with dubious eyes, because they don’t believe Vietnamese firms can develop high-technology products.

On Bach Khoa Anti-virus Center’s (BKAV) Facebook page, the inventor of BPhone pointed out that many other well-known smartphone models favoured by Vietnamese such as Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and Microsoft’s Lumia 640XL also use the three best known positioning technologies, including the Chinese Beidou.

Explaining the use of Chinese technology, an expert said this does not depend on phone manufacturers, but on microprocessor suppliers. In BPhone’s case, the supplier is Qualcomm.

Qualcomm’s documents showed that the company first integrated three positioning technologies, GPS, Glonass and Beidou, into a Snapdragon chip in 2013.

South Korea’s Samsung was the first phone manufacturer that used the chips with three technologies integrated, while Galaxy Note 3 was the first smartphone model in the world that used Beidou. Many other models using Beidou are available in Vietnam.

Besides Qualcomm, Broadcom, another microprocessor manufacturer, has also integrated Beidou into its products. However, the brand has been used mostly for computer manufacturers, not for mobile devices.

An analyst confirmed that Beidou is present in most of the products bearing strong brands in Vietnam, from Samsung, Sony, HTC, Microsoft and Xiaomi. These include popular models such as Galaxy S6 chip Exynos, Galaxy Grand Prime, Sony Xperia 73, HTC One E9+ and Nokia Lumia 730.

Therefore, the analyst said it is unreasonable to raise doubts about BPhone’s origin just because the smartphone uses Beidou.

Some people claim China hopes Beidou would be used worldwide by 2020. However, experts commented that problems still exist in Beidou which need to be fixed, and it less competitive than the US and Russian technologies. 

The New York Times reported that the US’s GPS still dominates the Chinese market, with a 95 percent market share.

Tien Phong