Two Chinese Companies I Trust

I've made two recent purchases that I'm extremely satisfied with. It's not every day that I go with a Chinese company and end up with no regrets.

1. Meizu music card MP3 Player
It was 650 RMB, which is roughly 1/3 of the price of a iPod Nano. They share a lot of the same features. Who know? Perhaps they copied it. It comes with 4Gs of storage, sliding-touch navigation (or whatever the technical term is), a radio tuner, and it even plays videos. The battery life is decent (~20 hours). The primary reason I bought it was because you can sort your songs by album and artist. Other cheap-ass MP3 players just list all of the songs together, which makes it an huge pain-in-the-ass to find the song you want.

The one, little negative about this player is that you can't fast-forward and rewind while watching videos. However, what made up for this was their customer service. I found an email address for customer service on their website (http://www.meizu.com/) and wrote to them. To my amazement, I received a reply early the next day. They say that this feature will be available when they make a software upgrade.

Even if this thing breaks after a year, I'll feel that I got my money's worth.


2. Ctrip
We recently bought a travel package to Bali through Ctrip. A few weeks after paying for it, I received a call from a rep. He called to tell me that the plane ticket prices had just been finalized by the airline, and that they would be refunding me 200 RMB. I had to ask again because I thought I heard it wrong.

Let's just say that if I owned a travel company, I wouldn't give a refund to my clients. They have no idea how much the plane tickets cost, so it wouldn't hurt just to keep the "extra" money.

I've been using their services for roughly two years now. Everything has been great with them. Competent staff. They actually call you back if you leave messages. And they actually give you exactly what you buy. I know that last sentence sounds funny. But hey, this is China.