With all the news of iPhone-inspired mobile phones, I thought I’d put together a list of the five most notable iPhone clones:
- Meizu miniOne
- Teclast T59
- LG Prada KE850
- ASUS Aura
- iSoftPhone
See these iPhone competitors reviewed after the jump:
iPhone Competitors
Meizu “miniOne” Trademark Already Taken
Apparently Meizu looks up to Apple like a big brother, because just as Apple used the iPhone name despite Cisco owning the iPhone trademark, Meizu’s iPhone clone, miniOne, also happens to share its name with a Venzero portable media player that has been out since last June.
Is Meizu being so aggressive in the hopes of attracting loads of attention via all the negative publicity? It’s working, I’m sure.
I can’t wait to see what happens when Meizu gets pounded left and right with lawsuits.
Meizu CEO Talks About Meizu M8
So I was only half-right about the Meizu M8. It is in fact not real… but only because the real Meizu iPhone-knockoff is named miniOne.
According to Engadget, Meizu’s CEO said on the Chinese Meizu forum that the Meizu miniOne debuted four days before Macworld, after which it underwent a name change and some design tweaks (to make it more like iPhone, duh!).
The Meizu miniOne “upgrades” so far:
Engadget appropriately compared Meizu’s miniOne tweaks to “double-checking your answers with your neighbors’ before turning in your test.”
4 more Meizu miniOne photos after the jump…
Meizu M8 vs. iPhone: Are the Phones Clones?
Here are some photo renderings of the supposed Meizu M8 phone, a nearly identical iPhone clone said to have:
- WinCE 6.0
- 3-megapixel camera
- 3.3-inch VGA+ screen
- GSM support
- TV-out, and more.
No one is sure whether these Meizu M8 concepts are real or fake, because Meizu has “borrowed features” from other products in the past.
My guess is that the concepts are fake. Meizu would have had to work their butts off to engineer an iPhone look-alike so quickly. Plus, if you look closely, you’ll notice on the photo below the Meizu logo on the M8 is of lower quality than the rest of the image:
Check out 3 more M8 images after the jump.
iPhone Competitors Say iPhone is Overhyped
The Canadian Press reported today what Apple’s rivals in the mobile phone industry think of the iPhone. May Wong summed it up well in her article on what Apple’s competitors are saying:
Apple’s competitors predict that even as the gadget will likely boost the company’s fortunes, it will have limited market share and fall short of the successes Apple has seen with its iPod portable music player. They contend some of the phone’s much-touted features – such as its touch screen, movement sensors and music player – are not innovative or new.
Samsung vice president Peter Skarzynski said of Apple’s iPhone, “They’re just jumping into the party where everyone else is.” Oh, that party where Apple is the popular hipster and everyone else is standing quietly over by the wall?
And Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said Nokia isn’t going to change its business approach because of the iPhone.
iPhone competitors say the iPhone is nice but “nothing revolutionary.” You wouldn’t expect them to admit if they thought Apple was going to blow them out of the business, though.