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Copycat "hiPhone 5" Surfaces In China
hypnosec writes "A fake iPhone 5, inspired by the leaked images of the device, has been discovered to be on sale in China. The quality of the hiPhone 5 varies with the price, with the most premium version of the device being available for 800 yuan or £76. The device reportedly comes in red and pink. Chinese media is reporting that the fake iPhone 5 is thinner than the iPhone 4 and comes with round edges. Other reports are claiming that the device is extremely light and almost feels like that one is holding a plastic toy. The reports are likely based on some images that were leaked by the supply chain." Since they're going to the trouble of building counterfeit stores, the knock-off phones shouldn't surprise anyone.
Is it a telling commentary on the decline of the US dollar that the price, on an American website such as Slashdot, is quoted only in yuan and pounds sterling?
800 yuan or £76
Can one of you foreigners please convert that into real currency?
Sure, China can copy apple products(along with manufacturing the official ones); but could they, through the bold adoption of a "One Child, but as many as you want if the first one looks like Steve Jobs" policy, conceivably create a Counterfeit Steve Jobs? Complete with a melamine turtleneck?
This is the invisible hand of the market doing its job. Exploit workers overseas and pervert the spirit of patents, copyrights, and trademarks only to further monopolize your position, going so far as to crate proxy lawsuits against your competitors and creating injunctions on other businesses only for extortion... yes, I'll have to admit I hope the hiPhone team springs of the excellent designs of the iPhones and makes a better, cheaper product. It's called progress.
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
Other reports are claiming that the device is extremely light and almost feels like that one is holding a plastic toy.
So now mobile devices that are light weight are assumed to be cheap? Interesting.
AFAIK most of the weight in any mobile device isn't the electronics so much as the battery. I hate light-weight things in general, but for a phone I'd mean that there is practically no battery life, unless of course they made a break-thru in storage I haven't heard about or it is solar and the electronics are just that efficient.
If the Chinese have announced an iPhone5 and are shipping, does that mean they can sue Apple when they release the iPhone 5?
800 yuan or £76
Can one of you foreigners please convert that into real currency?
I am shocked that no reply posts have converted to bitcoins yet. Has that "joke" truly runs its course? :-)
Chinese economy soaring, US economy crashing. China not giving a shit about patents, US living on patents... Correlation or just coincidence?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The yuan *is* the real currency, get used to it.
The Yuan is pegged to the US dollar so it is as real as the dollar is.
a lot of cheap ripoff phones have carp software
And where exactly is Apple's iPhone made?
If by "made" you mean "manufactured" then it is made in many countries. However the Chinese and non-Chinese made components are assembled in China.
China has been selling hiPhone garbage on eBay since the original iPhone. The policy at eBay is to kill all listings that look like an iPhone that aren't priced like one.
So buyer beware, when the real thing comes out, watch out.
Unless you weren't using 'cheap' as a synonym for 'fragile', in which case I have no idea where you got it from the sentence you quoted.
What are the chances that this was produced from or in part from the iPhone 5 designs or parts? We've heard the stories about factories in China often continue production after the official 'stop' resulting in counterfeit products that are actually the same products, just unauthorized.
Isn't it conceivable that there could be certain parts meant for iPhone 5 already in production and that these parts were used to make this new phone?
Just a thought...
http://www.hitunes.com/
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_UicgYwyB2Bw/Skqlj68bB0I/AAAAAAAAD4I/seNR0o_hAAs/s1600-h/mini-copy_1390313i.jpg , for example.
Those terrible red chinese communists, I'd love to tell them one thing or two... does anyone have their number?
I agree with you completely. I am not surpraised at all.
We must move immediately to keep poor people from buying cheap knock-offs lest Apple's copy restriction privelege be slightly devalued in a market that doesn't exist for their over-priced steveDevices! Surely there are several thousand young men and women willing to go overseas, fight and die to protect this sacred monopoly.
Holy crap? Seriously? China copied some super-popular electronic device and sold a higher-quality version for a tenth of the price because they aren't all greedy assholes and don't get hung up on bullshit like intellectual property and other bogus patent-based shit? Wow...
If they stole them from Apple and sold them, I'd be a little upset. As it stands, they are manufacturing, marketing, and selling them themselves, using their own investment money. Fuck you Apple, you don't own an idea.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
This is what happens when you turn over manufacturing to a 3rd party that you have no real control over.
Yeah - good luck with that. Oh and those fake Apple stores .... they were going to build those anyway. Apple just helped things along by sending China all its design info.
I hope this happens to many "American" companies who outsource manufacturing.
Its not the years, its the mileage
At the very least you would think they would throw Android on it.
Fake iPads do that. The packaging looks like Apple's. The device looks like Apple's. Start it up, wait ... that's a droid logo.
Sounds fishy to me.......(:
The submitter lives in the UK and pounds sterling is his or her native currency.
But feel free to presume ideological reasons if you'd prefer to grind an axe rather than use common sense.
What do you mean "now"? It's not whether they're light, actually, but whether they're dense. Cheap, shitty electronics have a lot of empty space. Expensively designed and molded electronics have less.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Something nobody seems to be pointing out is that maybe Apple and other American companies need to understand the Chinese culture and Chinese laws and hire better Chinese lawyers to prevent or be able to litigate against these kinds of maneuvers in China.
Another idea, how about American companies just make a part of their manufacturing deal with Chinese manufacturing companies for that company X to effectively buy all IP rights for said product to be manufactured in only China. If Chinese manufacturing company X doesn't make an even more cut-rate offer to get the business, company Y will get it instead and make tons of money not only manufacturing for the US, but by also making local knockoffs legitimately.
As a comment from a person who has actually bought one as a gimmick, I can tell you that it wouldn't fool the blind. It is simply NOT a copy of the real thing. They are typically Android phones, or some pen-based phone OS, with an external design that looks like an iPhone. As soon as you use it however, it's really very clear what it is.
The only good thing I can say about them is that they come with a TV app.. ;) You can watch TV on them, there's typically an extendible antenna. (Yes, analog free to air TV still exists in Asia).
Sorry to burst bubbles, but there is nothing innovative about them. They're cheap cheap phones with a TV, and a case looking like an iPhone. And this makes journalists think that there is a story.
Same for the allegedly fake Apple store: Newsflash: Apple products are legally sold in non-Apple stores all over the world. This is simply a legal reseller of actual Apple products who went the extra mile of decorating his store in an Apple style. Oh the horror. :rolleyes:
It be cool if they put MeeGo on these and conquered the world.
Not even a damn picture of the device. sigh.
Anywayt, when is Apple going to block the sales of this device on China over this patents and intellectual property blatant violations? Oh wait, they can't. Silly me. Keep doing that to Samsung, maybe you can milk son bucks from them.
Android 2.2 and has Android market access.
Its not state of the art and it has a resistive touch screen but it runs the apps I want and I can use it with
my cheap prepaid sim card.
If I were Apple id be FAR more worried about the increasingly "cheap and good enough" android phones
than any crappy iphone knockoff.
Isn't Samsung being sued because the Galaxy Tab "supposedly copied" the look-and-feel of the iPad?
..
Yet the hiPhone (and other chinese rip-offs, including that fake apple store in china) blatantly advertises itself as an iPhone clone and seems to get away with it scott free.
You'd think that with the amount of money Apple has in their coffers they'd have an official or two in their pocket to make sure that the hiPhone manufacturers are being kept in line
then they'll wonder why they ever bought into a PDA with proprietary software and a proprietary Network Adapter that you can't turn-off from reporting your GPS location.
OpenMoko is where it is at, and I don't care how much faster a iPhone or a Hi-Phone ever becomes when my phone runs open-source Linux with a USB host adapter (Neo Freerunner) that where it is eclipsed by processing power will always be more modular that never-again will a so-called CELL PHONE such as my PDA ever become antiquated and non-servicable to the next junk network. I even run the Linux client of Skype in a VM on this Neo Freerunner whenever the WiFi is within range of an open AP. Iphone is a hood-rat compared to this.
Who in their right minds would buy a locked-in computer phone like a Sony Mylo 2 just because Apple Inc created it? It's all cripple-ware computers trying to supplant desktops and Open Source. We all knew the result of when Homebrew computer hobbyists and VESA assented to their ISA bus to be copied into corporations offering a competing product. It's poorly implemented, moth-balled, and gone, with every revision of the corporations fabbing their patented technology to astro-turf ontop of existing open standards to divert interests in science to a vendable exploit.
Definitely a patent infringement!
But will it run iOS?
Speaking of which, how did Apple not manage to get sued by Cisco?
Does this remind anyone of the South Seas tribes who, after WW2, made wooden radios and beacons in the expectation that they would cause aircraft bearing advanced goods to land?
You never know who has developped the hardware/software in China and if there are any backdoors for law enforcement. Considering that they are running the Great Firewall of China, I wouldn't want to have all my data stored in the "Cloud" as I presume a lot of the iPhone data does right now or is moving that way.
If this phone doesn't do the Cloud storage, I would see this as a definite advantage for personal freedoms (relatively speaking) .
Its not state of the art and it has a resistive touch screen
Of course it does. You ever try writing chinese characters without a stylus? Or taking your gloves off to answer the phone in February in Beijing?
It is time to re-think this through. Apple decided that Chinese make good products. Well, now they make decent products based on Apple's work, which was based on others work. Since Apple has decided that only the share holders and top ppl of apple deserve to be American, why not go all the way through? Lets just quit buying Apple (and MS for that matter) and start buying chinese products that are ripoffs.
I wonder if these bootleg iphones will become a truely geeky status symbol. "Forget the real iPhone. They are easy to come by. I have the super-exclusive hiPhone 5. You can't get these things ANYWHERE. I have a hookup in China that smuggles them into the states if you're interested. They cost four times as much as the real iPhone here in the US because they're totally illegal."
There have been Hiphone phones for years now. The first one wasn't very good, but by the Hiphone 4, they were getting halfway decent reviews.
It doesn't integrate with Apple's overpriced ecosystem. It's a straightforward unlocked GSM smartphone. And, unlike with Apple, you can replace the battery.
If you ever needed proof that "Communism" is a far right wing tool to exert power over the masses, go to China. The link he showed is true. They just want to overpopulate these ghost blocks with people from the countryside to activate their kill grid and wipe out as many people as possible when they neutron us or whichever way they choose.
The Netherlands benefit from the Marshall plan, American tax payers money send to Holland to restart the economy after WW2. One of the most notable was the investment that allowed Hoogovens, an iron smelter, to be created. It would become one of the better ones in the world, a major contribution to the dutch economy AND a competitor to American steel.
Japan was also selected by the US for enhanced economic growth. Much of its culture was heavily guided by McArthur including things as schooling. Now MAYBE some Americans thought they could turn that country into a source of cheap labor but the Japanese government had an entirely different idea. With long term plans they setup entire industries with a clear goal of first producing crap for the local market and parts for the foreign market then improving the local products and shipping cheap but not good to foreign markets, then good products locally and finally good products abroad. Honda? Toyota? Sony? There is a long list of super companies that ALL started out with lousy reps in the west. Then for a long time they were just known for high quality. Japanese cars especially went from barely fit to drive to examples of just how crap American made cars were by comparison.
Korea saw all this and liked it and did EXACTLY the same thing. All the Asian tigers are copying it and China is just very very good and extremely large. A few japanese cars coming on to the western market just meant Detroit lost a bit of fat. Korea made Detroit go hungry. Chinese cars will finish Detroit off. Indian cars will rape its corpse.
What was produced in Japan was copied in Japan. Same for Korea and China. And then Japan changed and actually started to produce better good themselves because the Japanese government still invested in industry not the financial market. Anyone who think the financial market is an industry should just die. Why was the transistor pocket radio made in Japan? Transistors were not a Japanese invention. Name an American consumer electronics brand. I don't know any and I am near half a century old. (Meaning I saw some of the switch from Japanese crap to Japanese quality) Granted I am from Holland but why do I know several Japanese and other asian brands but not a single US brand for TV's?
It shows just how long this process has already been going on. The process of all production shifting to the east.
The portable transistor radio was a famous Sony product for fitting a radio into a shirt pocket if you first enlarged the pocket. But the walkman then came into fashion. An American concept? A European one? No, Japanese again. MP3 players would re-boot that industry. Did Sony make them? No. Were they made in the US? If you now happily shout YES because of Diamond... oops sorry, the first mp3 player was made and sold in asia. Search for MPMan.
And for a long time the biggest players were Korean. Not American until the iPod hit the scene. A device entirely made in China. US design, asian production... cheap knockoffs... gosh if only there was an example in history... well there isn't ONE example in history, there are LOTS.
What is forgotten by a lot of people is that the west did not get what it was thanks to the million dollar incomes. It got there on the back of people making a mimimum wage but making it reliable. Working on an assembly line may not be glamorous and may not be the future you want for your kids but it puts bread on the table and pays the rent. 1 iPod designer, 1000 people on the factory line supporting their families. Only problem, the 1 iPod designer is in the US,the 1000 people are in China. What do the 1000 Americans do? Work for the iPod designer? That is what reaganomics would tell you. But reagan and his supporters are morons. The current economic cricis is the proof.
The US, the west, ANY country NEEDS those 1000 factory workers because if those 1000 aren't on the assembly line they are un-employed. England and its riots, France and its riots and the US and its riots are the warning signs.
Paris Fra
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The reason APPLE has an Iphone is because they weasled into the phone industry like how Microsoft has been weasling into the console gaming industry. These are monopolists, you idiot!
It's not a poor device, is not a slow processor, it's not a crappy screen. I suppose you would lecture why none should buy a OpenPandora console?
Confirmed: processor over 400MHz, Touchscreen, gravity gyro's, Camera, True-Color, GPS, Wifi 802.11G, 850/900 MHz bands etc, and Linux.
What were you trying to run on your OpenMoko besides a mp3, Internet Radio, or VideoCam/Video-Phone session?
Part of buying a product is that you endorse the company to a profit that pays for the development of the next model to be much better. The first Linux PDA was a Agenda VR3 PDA (60MHz NEC processor /w 16MB RAM) from ST Electronics, and they never released the next model because of attitudes like you.
Has anyone found out how to buy them online yet?
Since they're going to the trouble of building counterfeit stores, the knock-off phones shouldn't surprise anyone.
That's somewhat of a tautology, isn't it?
I mean, they're hardly going to build a counterfeit store, and then use it to sell genuine iPhones, now, are they?
Actually mobile devices that are light are assumed to be expensive. That's why a knockoff that's lighter and cheaper than the original is usually expected to lack in quality.
Why do we continuously do business with a country that is nothing more than a common crook?
When will we EVER raise the damn import taxes on China? I could care less if we receive imports from them, or if a business fails that relies on them as well.
Where are Apples factories?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.