iPhone Clones: China, start your photocopiers

Shanghaiist can’t wait for the iPhone. Of course, we aren’t willing to drop the $500 ($600 for 8 GB model) required to tout the latest and greatest from Apple just quite yet. After all, who actually bought the first generation of iPods back in 2001? The iPhone won’t work in China for a long while thanks to it being exclusively paired to AT&T’s mobile service and, strangely enough, won’t feature a removable SIM card. What we are excited for, though, is the rush of touch-screen copies and look-alikes that are sure to hit the market in the coming months.

Some have already been announced and hyped, such as the Meizu Minione. While the Minione is strikingly similar to the iPhone, it isn’t quite a full-fledged knockoff. There's also the Microsoft-based HIC Touch, though it seems to be targeted at more business users over the iPhone's more consumer-friendly features. Luckily, for those who need as close to the original, without paying original prices, actual iPhone knockoffs have already been popping up in China. This site describes one of the first fakes to show up in Chinese electronic markets. While it sort of looks like the real deal, it isn’t quite there in features yet. The phone touts a two megapixel camera, abilitity to hold two SIM cards that can be switched on the fly (Shanghaiist has never heard of this feature in phones ... Is it common?), and comes with a second, removable battery. The phone only comes with 320 megabytes of memory, but that is expandable with a SD card slot (A 2 GB card can be obtained for less than RMB 250).

Unfortunately, the biggest letdown of this knockoff is that it requires a stylus, and we all know styluses are so 2006.

Photo from, and more available at, equinox.