Over at Cult of Mac, Leander Kahney has a post on fake Chinese iPhones, which started out terrible and are getting…well, they’re still terrible in many respects, but you might mistake one for a real iPhone at first glance. At least until you turned it on and tried to do anything with it.

These aren’t like the pseudo-iPods I took pictures of last year, all of which imitated Apple’s MP3 players with great energy without quite claiming to be iPods. Today’s fake iPhones are genuine counterfeits (is that an oxymoron?), and even come in knockoffs of the distinctive Apple box.

Of course, it’s a lot easier for a Chinese factory to crank out a piece of hardware that looks more or less like an iPhone than it is to write an operating system that behaves more or less like iPhone OS. So the iPhoneys run Linux, with a home screen that mimics the one on the iPhone. But all they manage to plagiarize from iPhone OS is some of its surface detail.

Here’s a video demo of one from MacMedic:

 
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Read more: Apple, Apple. iPhone, Counterfeits, Smartphones