Features

Nokia batteries and fakes "look identical" - even to Nokia

"We've tried everything to make genuine Nokia batteries recognisable. We put holograms on them; they were copied inside seven days. We put an electronic chip inside the battery: it was copied in 16 days. We even considered packaging the batteries in clear plastic, so you could see what was inside ... "

On Monday, Nokia will release details of a raid, in which it discovered "a large consignment" of fake Nokia car-kits. They are functional, up to a point - that point being, when the temperature rises. They get very hot; if the weather is hot, and the car is hot, it's quite conceivable these fakes could cause a fire.

There have been several reports that batteries made by Nokia can be dangerous. And the damage to the company's reputation has been repaired: they aren't Nokia batteries. They're fakes, too.

It's easy to believe that Nokia would love to be able to generate the sort of publicity that it got last week. After all, to get a reputable Belgian testing laboratory, Test-Aankoop, to confirm that the (expensive) Genuine Article is safe, but the (cheap) fakes are dangerous, and should be avoided - well! - imagine if HP and Epson could pull off the same trick for printer ink! Apart from ruining the spam industry, it could double profits for the printer companies.

But the only way Nokia can take advantage of the virtue of its own, genuine products, is if it can defeat the counterfeiters. You have to be able to tell chalk from cheese.

Nokia phone batteries don't explode - and the Belgian lab which said they did, has apologised for testing fakes, by mistake. They aren't innocent beginners; they're a well equipped laboratory. And the problem is real, as I discovered when I asked Nokia: "How do you tell?" - and they admitted: even they can be fooled.

"We don't know until you actually break one apart with a hammer, and look inside, and see that it doesn't have a protective fuse." Nokia can't tell. Test-Aankoop couldn't. A lot of the fakes can't be distinguished from the originals, without taking them back to headquarter and opening them up..

How many of these fakes are there? Sources inside Nokia played down the scale of the problem this week, saying that "nobody has any idea of the proportion of fakes there are, but we don't believe it's that big an issue."

But the problem only shows up if the battery is physically damaged, first. That's not common; usually, this happens when you drop it. That can - but usually doesn't - deform the case of the battery, and the charging wires inside it can (but don't always) short. That, in turn, produces heat, and gas; and the hot stuff inside the battery comes out, not quite explosively, but with some force, and people get burned. But probably, only a tiny proportion of the duds are ever stressed in this way; most will work fine.

Inside the battery, there should be a circuit - a fuse, essentially - which says that if a short-circuit occurs, the charger stops pumping power into the battery. In the Nokia battery, there is one. In the fakes, there isn't.

In theory, most fakes are more vulnerable to this; they are built with a tough steel case, which is more easily broken than the flexible aluminium case that Nokia uses. [Ed note: this is actually the opposite of what we originally published!] But without a magnet handy, you can't tell - not till it's too late.

"We honestly don't think reputable stores with a reputation to lose would touch the fakes," said a Nokia executive this week. But how would they know? Some fly-by-night traders may be selling these deliberately, but if Nokia itself can't tell from seeing the battery in its packaging, why would even a Dixons manager or a Carphone Warehouse salesman suspect the contents of an apparently factory-fresh carton?

And the scale of the problem, say insiders, may be larger than Nokia is prepared to admit. A lot of the fakes are quite good quality.

Worse still, is the problem of the fake which is genuine! "What seems to have happened in some cases, is that the resellers have actually put the fake battery into the phone itself. Then, taking the genuine Nokia battery out of the phone, they've put it into the packaging and sold it as a spare; and in that case, even if you suspected that the spare might be a dud, it isn't!" - a baffled Nokia marketing guru explained. So even if the manager of a reputable store suspected the price was a bit too good to be true, a quick check would show that this was, indeed, the Genuine Article.

Few countries make it particularly easy to catch the villains. In the UK, for example, where the laws are particularly clear, they still don't give the owner of the brand any rights to take action. "You can't rush into the store and seize all the goods. You have to go to the Trading Standards people, and report it; and then they send an agent. Then there are proceedings ... "

Monday, Nokia will release details of the raid on the car kits. There will be some reports, and some people will have second thoughts, perhaps, about buying bargain devices - but many of them will take the view that if they are not branded "Nokia" then they are probably not fakes.

So you can see that it isn't a Nokia publicity campaign. "There are a lot of good value batteries provided by other people," concedes a Nokia executive, speaking on condition he isn't quoted by name. "We can't say that 'only Nokia brand batteries can be trusted; because it isn't true, and would be libellous. So we're not really happy, because this actually makes people suspicious of the stuff with our name on it."

The idea of making the battery casing of clear plastic would at least ensure that you could see what you were getting ... but most buyers wouldn't know what a thermal fuse looks like. In an industry where people have been seen trying to make a PDA work without ever realising that there's a stylus built in, or trying to use a stylus on an SPV smartphone, you can't expect technical expertise from your customer.

Finally, it should be apparent that this isn't a problem which you can avoid by buying other phone brands. Rival suppliers may not have got the headlines that Nokia did; but they know the problem is there.

Ultimately, the problem is caused by high margins. Phone companies sell the phones aggressively, hoping to recoup their profits by asking eye-watering prices for hands-free devices, spare batteries, cases, and other accessories.

As long as the margin is good enough to justify the time and trouble of making an undetectable fake, there will be fakes.

In the meanwhile, however, the old adage applies: "If the price looks too good to be true, it probably isn't true." Avoid suspicious bargains unless you really do know what you're doing.

Report any suspicious product to Nokia's complaints department if in doubt.