Bike Shopping in Shenzhen (plus iPhone 5 cases!)

Last weekend my friend Nat and I went up to Shenzhen.  I used to go almost every weekend but with all my travels the last year I go much less often lately.  

The main reason I wanted to go was to check out if they were selling any iPhone 5 cases and accessories,  and the main reason Nat wanted to go was to look and see what kind of bikes were on sale over there.  (because we've been going biking so much, he's thinking about getting his own...)

First stop was a bike shop off of Hubei Road in Lo Wu.  This one specialized in Dahon bikes (which is a US company started by a Taiwanese guy... which has a factory here in Shenzhen apparently).   

These are all of the folding variety...  they can get quite expensive for the fancier models,  but as you can see, an HAT060 goes for only 911 RMB, which is like US$150.   Not bad, 8 speed Shimano gears... 

The shop was nice, they let Nat test drive it around the street a bit.   Ultimately we decided to do some comparison shopping before committing. 

So we hit up a few more shops and also checked out the local Walmart -

This being China... they actually had a pretty comprehensive bike section... from cheap to not that cheap.... and folding and full sized both... (but unlike Beijing,  no electric bikes,  Shenzhen has some weird restrictions on electric bikes in the downtown area now.... very bad move!)

As you can see, some of these guys were much cheaper...  but they're no name and pretty junky. the cheapest we saw for a non-folding bike was about 300 RMB. Which is less than US$50. 

I noticed that some of the bikes were made by the Tianjin bicycle company that made my Beijing "Tianjin Battle" bike too,  but for some reason here they're branded differently:

If it was spelled 'Batter', you could just call it a variation on "Battle"... but instead they spelled it "Bater"....      embarrassingly bad English?  just wait until they come out with a model called the "Master".  :-P

Funny English was not limited to just the name...   

Anyway,  we didn't get any bikes at Walmart either.  :-P

In between those two stops we hit up a few markets, including my favorite one for mobile phone stuff.

I was in search of iPhone 5 stuff,  they had plenty of cases...  I got a nice one for about US$5...

Its plastic, but has a nice chrome metallic finish. 

but I was disappointed to find out no one had any USB cables with the new plug.. or even the adapter.  

Its may be because there's some proprietary tech in the new cable design that they haven't figured out yet....   but more likely its just because very few people in China have an iPhone 5 (because I don't think anyone has figured out how to get Mainland carrier info onto one of those new nano sized SIM cards....  which means you can only use it with wifi or roaming from an overseas carrier. 

So even the cases are mostly being sold to Hongkies visit....