Is This Thing Real?

We were at Low Yat Plaza, one of KL's electronics malls, in the downtown yesterday.

Yes, we were on another mission...and yes, J will be posting about it very soon I'm sure.

I want to talk about the funny thing that happened while we were looking for this toy, but first, some history...

A couple of weeks ago, we were down in the same mall in search of cheap memory stick pro duo's. Armed with the prices available for the 2 GB cards in Canada, we went to all the shops which sold them to get pricing. And man did it vary. There was almost a 200 RM ($66 CDN) spread in prices from cheapest to most expensive!

I was ready to settle for a card that I had bargained for already for 250 RM. Not bad I thought. A bit cheaper than what I saw online in Canada (although tigerdirect had it even cheaper I found out later!) anyways, we thought we'd hit one more shop where we saw some and to our surprise, the sales person told us it was 188 RM!!! It even came with some "free" mp3's....yes, I got 180 MB of love songs! :)

After I asked if he could go cheaper (I just had to ask! :) ), he explained something about how they were overstocked and this is cheaper than anyone else already....whatever so we bought it and it's worked great ever since.

Now back to yesterday...we're checking out this gizmo, which happens to be another memory stick pro duo user and while bargaining for it we mentioned another shop had a 1GB included for x amount...the sales guy did some calculating and said he didn't know how they could give that price UNLESS....unless the memory stick was a fake from China!!!

He told us how there are companies that have copied the outside packaging for these sticks, all with the official Sony labels and such. Appartently, it has forced Sony here in Malaysia to put out packaging with a special holographic sticker and pin number which you can log on to a website to check if it's legit.

To me it was a bit silly since if you are logging on to check this pin number, you've already bought the stick and if it's fake, there's probably not much you can do anymore. That thought aside, it left us wondering what the heck we bought 2 weeks ago? I definitely didn't have a sticker and pin number! So off we went looking at all the different shops which sold these sticks and some did and some didn't have the sticker. Some came with an adapter, some didn't. There's so much variety that I don't know what to believe.

I still don't know if what I bought was real, and we thought to avoid this problem, we would buy a Sandisk version for J's toy. Everyone pushes the 5 yr International warranty etc, but when we got home and I opened up the box, the little "warranty" sticker was ripped and only a little piece left, and on the box, it said warranty will be handled by the company we bought it from (instead of Sandisk I assume).

wtf man.....W...T...F!?!?