China Youth design Android-ed Iphone Knockoff in Record Time

A great post from CES 2010 coverage details how fast and smart the youth hackable movement is, especially in China. The big question everyone wants to know how to ignore seems to be, replicating mp3’s and windows 7, ok, but replicating hardware manufacturing and design?

Of course, who knows which app store it will be able to access… the google or the apple. But hey.. only a matter of weeks before there’s a knockoff for that. Isnt that what free markets are all about.. free?

The phone, apparently made in Shenzhen, runs a customized version of
the GOOG’s Android software (most recently promoted in the nexus one), well altered to mimic Apple’s iPhone software interface:

It comes in what looks like a proper iPhone box and has the proper iPhone shape and weight. This phone, however, also has a trackball for navigating the screen and Wi-Fi. (Chinese iPhones do not have Wi-Fi). So, it’s sort of an iPhone-plus.
[.. excerpted..]
All the menus look the same. The touch-screen features work the same. You would struggle to figure out that Android was under the covers rather than Apple’s software were it not for an Android logo that briefly appears during the boot sequence.
[.. excerpted..]
Oddly, the people who made this phone also try to present it as a knock-off of the HTC Magic device. During the boot sequence, a screen flashes, describing the phone as an HTT Magic product.
[full article link]

Go Go Gadget.