Ordinary Gweilo

Some good advice from Spike – Research before you shop for high tech items:

Basically, if you go shopping for this kind of stuff in HK and you haven’t done your research first, most shops will fuck you up, down and sideways – sometimes on purpose and sometimes because the people working in this shop are either stupid or just can’t be bothered to learn about what they’re selling.

Had I done more checking in advance, I would have skipped the Wanchai Computer Center and just gone to the Oriental 188 Shopping Center on Wanchai Road. AV Bi-Weekly magazine reports the 60 gig PS3 is selling for $3,780 there.

See, the thing is, there are a lot of locally published magazines – in Chinese – that cover this stuff in extreme detail – reviews, features, list prices and price comparisons at different shops. Local English-language coverage of this kind of stuff is minimal at best. Sure you can get American or Brit magazines for news and reviews or check the various web sites, but what you won’t get is local price guidance.

Another problem is that a lot of what is available in the malls is "unofficial" in one way or other (e.g. imported from Japan or the States, or adapted to overcome stupid region codes) so price comparisonswith other countries are not as simple as converting from one currency to another.   

So unless you have the time to check the prices in multiple Hong Kong malls it’s hard to know how much you should pay.  I suspect that staff in most of the outlets know that "foreigners" are probably less well-informed than locals.  Spike has a plan:

What I do is I buy the local Chinese magazines. My ability to read Chinese is limited and I’m more familiar with simplified characters rather than traditional and of course I can recognize the Chinese characters for different districts. And surprise! The stuff you absolutely need to see – model numbers, specs, prices, phone numbers – is almost all in English. When I’m really stuck, I can just show a page to someone in my office and ask them to translate for me. E-Zone costs $15 per issue. AV Bi-Weekly is $18. Other mags are similarly cheap.

I think that’s probably good advice.  Looking at what’s in the magazine and then scouring the Internet for additional product information in English will probably tell you what you need to know.

It’s depressing, but I suppose we just have to accept that English language media in Hong Kong is largely a waste of time.  Time to learn Chinese.