ABC News Ordered a Fake Apple Watch from China and This Is What We Got

Published at 5:14 am, March 20, 2015

EastIdahoNews.com Staff

ABC NewsBy BOB WOODRUFF

(NEW YORK) — China is a country where you can find almost anything.

There’s a good chance that if you want it then it is being manufactured in some factory or put together by one of its 1.3 billion citizens. So when I was in Beijing last week I assumed that we could find Apple’s Watch well before it’s officially released.

With our research we found good news and bad news. The good news was that we did find a watch that looks like an official Apple Watch with the same color and shape. The bad news was it is a counterfeit. A knock-off. A fake.

I learned about this because the story was being told in newspapers.

We heard there were two possible knock-offs. One called Ai Watch and the other called the D-Watch. We were told that we could buy one of them in a few stores but we took the easier route to buy online from a company called Taobao.

It is like eBay and Amazon put together. But this company is owned by Alibaba, which is growing fast. With our ABC Visa card our associate producer ordered one last Thursday when I was about to board the plane heading home to New York. In a perfect world I could have bought it online and had them mail it directly to my office in the U.S. But no. Taobao could only send it to an address in China. So when our Beijing team got it they had to send it here, where I got the chance to open it.

What can I say? The differences between the real one and the fake one are huge. On the knock-off there is a screen, but not a touch screen. If you expect an iPhone on your wrist then please just give up. According to the instructions you can use Bluetooth to connect to your phone but only with Android. No chance you can connect to any Apple devices.

So if you want to brag and show off then go ahead and buy one of these. They are much cheaper. We bought ours for $47 instead of the $350 for a real one. It could look good on your wrist but only from afar. Keep it away from the eyes of your friends.

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