With the iPhone 5S reportedly a few months away, ardent copycat vendors in Shenzen, China took it upon themselves to come up with an iPhone 5S of their own. Meet the GooPhone i5S, a total rip-off based on Android Jelly Bean 4.1.2 which sells for just $149 contract-free.
Now, imagine if Apple actually made a sub-$200 budget iPhone – or offered a $149 off-contract iPhone 5 for that matter (its cheapest contract-free handset is the $450 iPhone 4). GooPhone’s cheap iPhone lookalike – and I’m using the term loosely here – goes on sale tomorrow and the first 1,000 buyers will pay only $99 for it…
In case you’re interested, the GooPhone i5S has a four-inch 854-by-480 pixel display, 3G cellular networking, a five-megapixel camera on the back, a 1.3-megapixel forward-facing camera and runs a 1GHz MediaTek MT6577 dual-core processor with 512MB of RAM.
Granted, these are hardly earth-shattering specs, especially compared to the speedy iPhone 5 with its Retina display and the excellent eight-megapixel camera module, but you get what you pay for.
Speaking of cheap, perhaps all this talk of an inexpensive iPhone is baseless, maybe Apple really doesn’t know how to make a cheap iPhone that doesn’t suck?
By the way, you gotta give it to them for modifying Android heavily in order to make the interface resemble iOS as closely as possible. I was also surprised UI wasn’t as much laggy as one would expect Android to be on low-cost hardware.
If you decide to take the plunge, you can pick up the i5S up over at Android-sale.
[via Cult of Mac]