Keepin' it real fake, part CII: Chinese iPhone knockoff thinks different (with infomercial)
By Ryan Block 
posted Dec 16th 2007 6:05PM
posted Dec 16th 2007 6:05PM
[Via Engadget Chinese]
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1GB of memory (via microSD)
at least the knockoff has some expandable memory!
+1 point for iClone..I can't believe there a infomercial for it.
Though you have to wonder if it has SDHC support.
1600 is the neame/series?
1600 on there means 160,000,000 colours.
At least that's what it kept on advertising, It might also be the name though.
Shake your phone to replace the "call" button, geez, how many prank calls while you make in a short jog?
Also,
Is it just me or does the 3.2 stand for 3.2 megapixel camera. I'd rather get that :)
JAmerican
lol 3.2 stands for "3.2 inch" screen. I don't think this thing has a camera. It didn't advertise at all about its camera function.
yes, the actual model is the d99i by DigitalRise... the infomertial just says 160,000... there is a newer D800i HiPhone model that was just released before the chinese new year though... it is tri-band whereas the D99i is only dual band which means it is not for the US... http://www.chinagrabber.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=1531&HS=1
I may not understand Chinese but I'm sold. Like Tiger Woods would say if he dumped the Black community for the Asian, "So long fried chicken, hello fried rice".
Me want that telly.
As a Chinese, I feel so embarrassed...
dont, I love chinese! they copy but they do it with so much heart!!! did you saw the fake disneyland there in the news... that was priceless! its close now but its sad... it was so creative, mixing Mickey with Hello Kitty, Lion King and Gundam!!!
tits: I know of the fake Disneyland thing in Beijing, but didn't know it's now closed for good. I didn't even know that Gundam was in it!
where can i get one of those?
i agree - it looks a lot like an iPhone. Then again, everything does through these nifty iGlasses Stevie J gave me...
China.
well, it advertises that phone is launched worldwide, but i doubt it...
try ebay... but search iphone, then check the cheapest price.. lol
What is the lead content of this device?
2 curics for every ounce of plastic
As much as you want it to be...you put it in the last box in your order form.
Cause we all take our electronics internally to get our daily dose of lead :D
Actually, its lead-lined recycled condoms.
Y'know, that flick to answer thing actually seems kinda cool.
it does, [sarcasm]but what if your avoiding someone and they call u and u dropped your phone? Thats what im worried about [/sarcasm]
wixo, you seriously just put "sarcasm" in parenthesis. you fail
TO STEVEN:
DONT READ THE ARTICLE IF YOU DONT CARE.
Man, you need to relax. Its Sunday night in the US, and there isn't exactly much going on in the world of technology at this moment. Get up, go upstairs from your mommas basement, and have a moon pie or something.
Why bother commenting about posts about crappy DAPs of no consequence? NOBODY CARES!
If you don't like it, why not start your own gadget blog?
Can you blame them?
The cut those Eastern guys get for making the originals probably warrants xeroxing the blueprints and churning out a few replicas.
It's the capitalist way.
Thats not what happens.
its more a matter of getting the idea and using it, like reverse engineering the product and making another one with improvement (alteast what you feel are improvements).
Me want cheap iphone clone :P will it work in the US? and is there one on ebay I wonder...
and Steve, if they didn't post this kind of stuff, they wouldn't have very much to post...
1990 yuan is about $270 USD, that ain't too bad... But then you get what you pay for... so...
I bet it turns out like the Vii, nothing but this tiny breadboard sticky taped to the inside ;-)
Lol, the video quality makes the show look like it's from the '80s.
But will it blend like the iPhon3?
Probably, but I wish that the hands which use numbers instead of letters would.
I love the way you pick / hang up the phone calls though. At least that's innovative! Shake to pick up, shake to hang up. Shake to pick up, slip and fall to hang up. Run with the phone in your pocket to consequently pick up and hang up calls, without the hassle of even taking it out of your pocket, it's that easy!
That was kinda freaky. I need to stop watching infomercials.
I wonder if you can use your mp3's as ringtones on it...
mp3's what?
I care :) so don't speak for me!
Can someone not make an iPhone mod/app that lets you answer a call like this?
next time when apple release new product, they should release the proto type so the copy cats will copy the proto type. and then on the release day, apple will relase a totally new designed product.
whats your thought?
Apple did that with the iPhone. Remember when the guy from Digg spilled the beans about one of the prototype phones, and it turned out to be a bunch of bunk and nothing whatsoever like the iPhone?
In fact, I think that what he described may have turned out to be the inspiration for that Samsung phone that has a music player on the back side. Or it could have been the phone itself, and someone lied about it being from Apple. There are too many feints and dodges lately.
My thought is....
There's no need to do what you suggest. If Apple gave those stupid handset manufacturers the exact design prints, they'd still manage to screw up the device. Can you imagine an iPhone with WinMobile 6 on it? Use it with a stylus....? What a crock. They'd try and design it by committee and it would end up looking like something three blind men touching an elephant might design.
To consider themselves improving on the design they'll put every feature they can think of on it and either wind up with two hours talk time or make it about two inches thick. These companies think like bimbos. If a touch of makeup is good, an inch more of makeup is that much better. Yuck.
I'm fairly sure there are industrial spies trying to glean all the information they can in anticipation for the iPhone 2, but it's a waste of time. People with any pride want genuine APPLE IPHONES, not some crappy, piss-poor almost-iPhone imitations.
It'd be like trying to pass off some effin' Karmann-Ghia as a genuine Porsche Boxter. All the while proudly saying it runs just as good and is a whole lot cheaper.
I do think that shake to answer is a pretty slick move, even if it looks downright dorky. Good for practicing jerkin' the funky monkey. I'm not making fun of China or anything of the sort. Their culture is much different from the US and they view things differently. More power to them. In ten, fifteen years, we'll be copying their devices.
@@@ Constable Odo
HEY! I resent the remark about the Carman Ghia - but your trekky leetness sure dishes out a brow beating :[
anyways - back to the random mayhem - i guess it's been a fad that just won't die on engadget
I'm just here for the fun :]
at one point in the video u can see the iphone background...the one with the clownfish or whatever. thats funny..
are they watching a mandy moore music video from like 1999 lol
Ever notice that it's always the same announcer for every Chinese infomercial?
Dude must make a lot of money.
...
it's still better than the viiII.
http://www.cnbeta.com/upimg/071127/LonelyJames_214052.jpg
Reading many of the comments here (including from other similar stories on this forum), it is obvious that a lot of you salivate over this kind of trash from places such as China. Despite the fact you are aware that it shows complete disrespect for intellectual property. Why? Because (you think) it gets you what you want for a few bucks less, and therefore deserves encouragement. (And, clearly, anything that offers an opportunity to bash Apple, Microsoft, etc., can't be half-bad, right?)
When that job or service that you perform gets outsourced, I hope that the other part of your brain realizes exactly what happened, and why.
Good luck.
I think it also has a lot to do with it being trendy to hate the iPhone.
pretty sure 99% of the comments above yours were sarcism. no one is gonna buy this crap.
Woah, easy there! No need to turn what should be an interesting and humourous look at an iPhone knock-off into a slanging match. No amount of fuming about intellectual property rights is going to stop these devices being made and I doubt the majority of Chinese people have to money to shell out for something as expensive as the iphone so it's hardly cannibalising Apple's sales. Quite frankly, even here in the UK people aren't that willing to pay the premium for it either.
It's not that it's 'cool' to bash big companies, it's just that it's hard to see why a large corporation with massive budgets can't add the multitude of features that these smaller electronics manufacturers can. You can't help but feel shafted when one of these major companies puts out a product with limited format support, basic/common features missing (the iPhone is very guilty of this), not enough storage space, etc etc.
I find these things fascinating in terms of what they're like to use and whether they've managed to come any where near the standard of the original...plus, some of them are just so silly it's hilarious. The knock-offs may lack originality but the one thing I do hope they do is encourage lazy manufacturers to give people a reason to keep coming back to their products for more than the name.
Let me respond to just a couple of your points (admitting that I was being a bit harsh in generalizing, knowing fully well that some of the posts were just attempting humor; but it was on purpose, since I have seen similar sentiments expressed way too many times on this forum, and rarely has someone taken the trouble to point out the other side of the argument):
1) You said: ".......No amount of fuming about intellectual property rights is going to stop these devices being made and I doubt the majority of Chinese people have to money to shell out for something as expensive as the iphone so it's hardly cannibalising Apple's sales......."
Response: The issue is not whether the Chinese can afford it; it is really about whether you and I, in the West can afford it, and cheer this on because of the few extra bucks that we are trying to save.
2) You said: ".... it's just that it's hard to see why a large corporation with massive budgets can't add the multitude of features that these smaller electronics manufacturers can. You can't help but feel shafted when one of these major companies puts out a product with limited format support, basic/common features missing (the iPhone is very guilty of this), not enough storage space, etc etc."
Response: You have absolutely no idea why some of these things might be missing from a large corporation's product. (And, your holier-than-thou reaction is typical.) Perhaps there were unresolved or expensive IP issues involved, I don't know. However, I can **confidently** tell you that some Chinese knock-off company -- one that gives a hoot whatsoever about any IP issues in the first place -- cares little about any one of the "multitude of features" it adds to anything. After knocking off the look, the feel, the interface, and (heck) even the tag-line of a product, do you seriously think this company worries about offering lots of knocked-off "format support" or whatever else?
Infomercial...nostalgic. I used to watch infomercials when I was little :'(
Oops.... there was a "PS" to add to the above:
PS: Full disclosure -- my job has not been outsourced, and it is unlikely to be. IOW, I have no dog in the hunt. :-)
But can it play Doom ?
They should call it the iFong !!!
It's not really fake if they're not calling it an iPhone - it's just another device.
A steaming pile of shyte, this knock-off be. Only an iPhone 2 can out-iPhone an iPhone.
Actually, it's hawk not hock. =]
Dual-SIM? Why doesn't the iPhone have that? And the real iPhone should have had A2DP also. This thing does it all so much better...
i believe so, as there are so many private mp3 songs in china!!!
Atleast you can buy this unlike the Meizu which has been trying to rip off the iPhone for nearly a year now... :/
I can't help but wonder if the actual iwhatever manufactures leak engineering info to these knockoff companies.
can it be used as date rape drug??
The dude 35 seconds into the video looks a lot like Guy Kawasaki. I knew he'd get his revenge on Apple someday.
Lol, we Chinese are extremely good at this kind of stuff!
As far as I know, one of such iPhone clones have multi-touch interface or even something similar, this makes me wondering how much useful is a device with such a big screen but very few buttons.
At least its fully unlocked. ;-)
W"hy do you guys use roman numerals. Shit I haven't used those since second grade.
What is it doing at the beginning? It seems like it can detect the distance of people around. That's pretty impressive.
The Chinese are the lowest form of life on earth. They copy everything and put the ingenious people that designed the original products out of work because they can't compete with the price of products that have no development costs to amortise, no environmental or labor laws to which they must adhere, and their products are built by slave labor. Stupis ass Americans don't care that they put their own countrymen out of work to save a few bucks why they buy an inferior and ILLEGAL copy of a product designed in the US. The Chinese govt simply won't go after their own people for ripping off the intellectual property of anyone around the world. BTW, I have nothing to do with Apple or any labor unions - I guess I'm just one of the few that is concerned with the long-term implications of the selfish, short-sighted US consumers and govt entities that continue to allow these types of products to be imported.
I doubt this phone would be imported an widely sold in America, so it wouldn't impact sales of the iphone. And another thing, even without knockoffs like this, American jobs will STILL be outsourced. These knockoffs don't contribute much to the outsourcing of jobs. Look no further than the actual iphone. It is made in China.
Large corporations in the US have been outsourcing jobs for a long time. THEY are the ones to be blamed. It is not the Chinese's fault they are doing this. In fact, it is these Americans that are exploiting the cheaper labor. And be careful when you try to generalize a whole race/nation based on the actions of a few money grubbing companies. The companies in the US who are outsourcing jobs to make more money are NOT any more moral than these companies in China copying their products.
Good god, when is the maddness from China going to stop.... seriously!
So now every phone that has a big screen and grid based UI is a knock-off of an Iphone? In that case then the Iphone is a knock off of the LG Prada, HTC Magician, HTC Himalaya etc. etc. etc.
Please grow up.
It's considered a knock-off because they've put the iPhone background on it, given it white headphones, the same case design and called it 'Think Different' that's not quite the same as the LG Prada.
expensive..
add 90 € and you got a real iphone..
How many people will shake their phone, lose their grip and watch it fly into all sorts of precarious locations?
I suspect phones landing in toilets to be up 150% due to this product.
How can this be fake when it has more features than the original? It's unlocked, has shake-to-answer, expandable memory, bluetooth music streaming, shake-to-send files, shake-to-skip-tracks,
Granted, they stole the clownfish background, and used the "Think Different" slogan. But isn't copying the best form of flattery?
If anything, because of this "fake", we do, and we will, expect Apple to have a product to have at least all these features. Why? Because the Chinese have shown that it can be done, and done at $270. The pressure for Apple now, is to release the next generation of the iPhone at about the same price, with at least the same features as this "fake".
There is nothing wrong with these "fakes". As far as I can tell, the same happens in the auto industry. Lexus , Infinity and Accura all have models that "look like" their more expensive competition. No one complains that "it is a copy". No one complained that side-airbags were copied from the Mercedes, or Sat-Nav, or 3-point seatbelts for that matter.
Now, back to the "fake iPhones". Can these be considered fake if they do not run the same OS? Or are they considered "iPhone-like"?
Racists and bigots are the lowest forms of life on earth.
Considering the price, its better to have than the original one. If the chinese can do it, they should make a name for themselves... It's a consumer game... I am sure 50% or more wants what they created..
The newest iphone clone model is A380i, it is a Triband phone, check it here :
http://www.totobay.com/a380i-dual-sim-card-phone-with-bluetooth-p5578.html#description
The newest P168+ has been released out, check it here:
http://www.totobay.com/p168+-dual-sim-card-phone-with-bluetooth-p5766.html#description