iPhone, iPhome, hiPhone, ...

China is the piracy capital of the world, everybody knows. The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) estimates that 46 percent of the pirated goods sold in America come from China. The pirated audiovisual materials occupy 95 percent of the market in large cities, and the Business Software Alliance (BSA) claims that software piracy in China alone costs the industry $4 billion a year worldwide. Almost everything that can be imitated has been imitated by Chinese companies, and the iPhone is not an exception.

Do you know the HiPhone or the SciPhone? They where the first iPhone clones coming from China. Looking almost identical to a real iPhone from the outside, they had serious hardware limitations, and from the point of view of software and usability, they were fairly pathetic. But Chinese engineers had more time to work on their imitations, and new clones are becoming more and more believable, to the point where it's almost frightening. If you do not believe me, take a look at the new iPhome 3G (“m” instead of the “n”).

The iPhome 3G has a 3.5-inch 480 x 320 touchscreen, is powered by a 400mhz Samsung processor and quadband GSM. However, it doesn't support 3G or Wi-Fi (remember, it is a cheap version of the iPhone), and although it says 8GB when you decide to purchase it, the device only has 4GB of storage available. It has AVI, WMV, MP4 and 3GP support, and costs about 179USD.

Still, as close as they get to copying the hardware, (most of the clones even bring things that the original iPhone do not have, like microSD support) the software still falls flat on it's face.

So, by the moment it seems the iPhone is safe from clones, but Apple must keep the innovation maching working, otherwise, Chinise phones could take an important market share.