Grandpa takes a photo with grandma's smartphone at a park in Beijing on Nov 6, 2015.[Photo by Song Jingli/chinadaily.com.cn]

Since a Chinese-brand smartphone could bring so much fun without costing the buyer "a kidney", I decided to buy a new phone for my father-in-law. Although the one he was using had a broken display screen, he was reluctant to "let it go". In fact, all the phones he had used were the last-generation phones of us, which we stopped using because they were too out of date.

The first that attracted our attention was Nubia, which claimed its phones could be used as "single-lens reflex cameras" and could even be used to shoot stars. The three-year company also said its Nubia Z9 Mini Elite had an eye-scan encryption function, which was inviting enough.

When I was trying to order it on JD, I found there were more than 300,000 soon-to-be buyers like me and what we could do was to pre-order and wait until JD finally got the products.

The 1,499 yuan phone came on the night of Nov 4, but stayed at our home for a short time.

My father-in-law said he disliked the phone and wanted to return it as he found colors in the photos taken by this Nubia phone were different from actual colors and the eye-scanning capacity turned out to be useless for him as it can only be applied to encrypt applications, not the whole phone.

The JD delivery guy came to pick up the phone and JD refunded me the second day. Thank you JD.

Usually returning goods once purchased is a cumbersome process. But in this case returning the device was a breeze, the best ever experience.