GooPhone, a Chinese company that produces knock-offs phones with Apple’s design is taking another page off Apple’s playbook – this time, getting a patent for their GooPhone 5, which looks uncannily like the next iPhone, and claimed to have initiated legal action to prevent Apple from selling the next iPhone in China.
As you can see from the image on the right, they label themselves as “humble folks”:http://www.hudong.com/wiki/%E5%B1%8C%E4%B8%9D (屌丝) and not the “rich and mighty”:http://www.hudong.com/wiki/%E9%AB%98%E5%AF%8C%E5%B8%85 (高富帅) aka Apple, and that they take pride in locally-made products and will try their utmost to keep the “bad Apple” out of China. They also claimed to develop the GooPhone i5 with locally developed technology and has patents to the external design. And to top off the claims, they added in some nationalistic illustration of the working class to complete the picture.
The GooPhone i5′s look resembles the current iPhone with several features that matched those from the leaked images of the next iPhone (see gallery at the bottom of the post). But instead of iOS, it will run on Android 4.1 Jellybean.
China’s own patent office has “seen tremendous action”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/chinese-firms-put-intellectual-property-lawsuits-to-work/2012/08/30/12d9a418-f1c3-11e1-adc6-87dfa8eff430_story.html recently and it will be interesting and possibly amusing to see how far GooPhone will take this, especially with Apple possibly making the announcement for the next iPhone on “September 12″:/2012/09/september-12/. Let’s wait and see.
(via “Cult of Mac”:http://www.cultofmac.com/188571/goophone-claims-to-have-already-patented-the-next-iphones-design-will-ban-sales-in-china/ and “GizChina”:http://www.gizchina.com/2012/09/04/chinese-phone-maker-goophone-i5-might-have-blocked-iphone-5-sales-in-china/)
