Portable Electronics Limited is a 100% New Zealander owned and operated company. Portable Electronics Limited has physical presence and representatives in New Zealand, Australia and China who may be available to meet and discuss your needs. We mainly operates online out of home office to reduce operating costs, so that we can pass on the savings to you. We provide Gargoyle/Openwrt router related products and services to both businesses and consumers that is not available elsewhere. In recent years, we are also exploring and investing in software and business applications/services. You can find out more by following the links at the footer of this web site. If you have any queries, feel free to contact us. We are a registered limited liability company in New Zealand. Our company number is 1805301 and our incorporation certificate can be viewed here. We are also GST registered and our New Zealand GST registration number is 93-820-061. We are registered in Australia as well and our ABN number is 31997329955.

History

Portable audio (music) players have been accompanying our lives for many decades. From the release of original Cassette-based walkman in 1979, CD walkman (Discman) in 1984, MiniDisc Walkman in 1992, MP3 players in 1997, Ipod in 2001 and Portable Media Player (PMP) in 2002. We have come a long way and underway tremendous evolution since its inception.

The increasing popularity of Ipod since its launch in late 2004 along with Apple Computer's launch of 4th Generation Classic Ipod music player have generated enormous public awareness on mp3 players. This inevitably also created a huge market for generic and branded mp3 manufacturers from China, Korea and US. As the mp3 market matures in 2006 and mp4 players start to emerge in the market, it became increasingly attractive to buy such device for self-consumption. The quest to obtain an non-Ipod mp4 player revealed the lack of choices in the Oceania market. Mp4 players are next to inexistant in New Zealand and the best way to obtain one at the lowest price is to import directly from overseas. This move eventuated the formation of Portable Electronics Ltd to supply these hard to get mp4 gadgets for the benefit of New Zealanders.

At the beginning, we started importing mp4 players that offer limited video playback ability from China Electronics Corporation (CEC), a China government owned organization. As the mp4 market advances, we moved to import PMP players which offers direct video playback without file conversion from OEM manufacturers. In 2007, mp5 players started to emerge and are heavily promoted from Agio, a well-known mp4 manufacturer in China. Mp5 players often boast the capability to play video files encoded in any formats, i.e. "Eat-All", it is a fancy term used by some manufacturers to differentiate it from the older generation of PMP players which often have limited codec support. However, it can be confusing to many customers and PMP is generally used.

Over recent years, we have been experiencing intense competitions from parallel importers, overseas online stores and ebay stores. Our competitors have been undercutting us in prices and product range. Ultimately, we have decided that selling physical products is no longer profitable. Therefore, we decided to focus primarily on services, especially those related to Gargoyle/Openwrt because even though these open source router firmware is fantastic and offers unparalled features, trying to get timely and meaningful support or help via forum is daunting for the average users.

As internet and online video streaming becomes embedded in our daily life, most people find it impossible to live without internet access. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important for users to actively manage their home/business network to ensure the activites of different users on the network does not interfere/degrade the internet quality with one another. The increasing popularity of open source firmware such as Gargoyle router enables everyone to manage their network, ensuring VOIP/Skype/Gtalk/Facetime/etc is always prioritized over less important traffic such as video streaming and bittorrent downloads. To help the average users achieve such goals, we decided to start selling Gargoyle firmware loaded routers and provide related services.

Business strategy and capability

Competitive price - We know price is an important factor to you. we operate entirely using the internet, reducing our running cost and bringing the cost benefit directly back to the customers. In additional, we source our products from the factory directly, cutting out the middle man and saves you money.

Quality product - We only sell quality products. As a consumer ourselves, know what consumers think. We will only sell a product that we think is great and we would use use it ourselves.

Excellent personalized service - We know service is very important to you and we deliver it the way you expect it. We value our customer and strive to provide you with top notch customer service and relevant advice, even if you don't buy anything from us. We visit Gargoyle and Openwrt forum regularly and you can see our numerous attempts there to help those in need.

Geographic distribution - With local presence in New Zealand, Australia and China, we are able to provide local support and warranty services in these countries.

Local warranty - We use locally sourced products backed by generous manufacturer warranty. If your product is broken, it will be repaired/replaced by the local distributor/manufacturer. There is no need for you to ship it outside the country.

Customization - Customization is king. Everyone have different requirements and expectations. The products we sell comes with dizzling ways to customize it to fit your needs. What you can do is only limited by your imagination.

Proactive - We constantly test our products, pro-actively identify potential problems (as well as from customer feedback) and work with developers on fixes constantly and release updates to the public as soon as possible.

Expert in networking - We have been working with Gargoyle/Openwrt based router for years and had use it for many different atypical network configurations. We believe we are capable of solving all your typical home/office network problems. 

Honesty is our priority when we communicate with customers and are highly transparent in our communications (e.g. our feedback forum). In addition, we pledge to attend and respond to all your enquiries promptly regardless of warranty status and will always discuss the best options for available to you.

Thank you for visiting.