Buying Mobile Phones at Kota Kinabalu

I and my teenage son, has just bought Motorola V3x for RM580 each, my wife a Nokia 6300(RM780) and my daughter Sony Ericson K750i(RM580).

You can get technical specifications for most mobile phones at:
http://www.gsmarena.com/
This is a European site that is well versed in almost all technical aspects of Mobile Phones but it does not have prices.

I used it to find phones with given technical specifications:

My specifications are:
Screen resolution: 240x320
Band: UMTS
Weight < 150g
Camera resolution >= 2Megapixel

It contains user comments that may be useful in determining the reliability of mobile phones.

For Malaysian price comparisons, a competitor to gsmarena is at http://www.mobile88.com.my/.
This site could be the best when it comes to price comparisons in the world at the moment. It provides technical specifications as well as technical comparisons.

However this website is too cluttered and filled with subjective advertising(advocative) descriptions of all mobile phones, but it does have price information that seems to be updated.

Another way of determining prices will be from ebay and Malaysian lelong. lelong has the best prices on offer even without freight charges. ring mobile in lelong is by far the cheapest consistently. It has reasonable feedback and claims nationwide warranty support.

The cheaper prices are those termed as AP, or rather parallel imports where warranty is from importers that are not recognised by the local Mobile Phone Manufacturer's representatives, mostly Zitron.

Recently the price differences has become more than RM100 so it is not worthwhile anymore to buy from these local representatives unless longer warranty periods and ease of mind is of the highest priority.

My previous experience with an AP supplier was bad but not disastrous. The supplier does not even have the code to unblock an already blocked Siemens M35 for the European Market. I saved RM40 but it was damaged 2 years ago while an obsolete but still perfectly functioning M35 for the Malaysian Market distributed by Hello Marketing still survives to this day.

For detailed reviews of mobile phones, go to this Russian site
www.mobile-review.com/.
gsmarena also offers better professional looking reviews compared to user-reviews and that in Malaysian newspapers and other publications. Malaysian reviewers are too commercialised. They won't mention any bad points about a product let alone make recommendations to the manufacturers how to improve their products.

For mobile phone buyer at Kota Kinabalu, we are fortunate that our prices are lower than those at Kuala Lumpur. My son has just returned from Kuala Lumpur hoping for a bargain but was disappointed. Based on my web search, the cheapest can be found via mail-order through ring mobile. In order to order safely, it is better to use the safe-trading facility offered by lelong but it will add 2% to the cost of the mobile phone.

The cheapest prices can be found at Master Phone Shop, at the ground floor of Centre Point, Kota Kinabalu but other shops may be able to match their prices. Service-wise it is also excellent. It is best that we buy from this shop unless they run out of stock and we are in a hurry to buy mobile phones. It kept on getting out of stock of the V3x.