Meizu isn’t aspiring merely to copy the designs of a Western manufacturer on the cheap. “You’ll be warmly welcome,” Wong wrote me.īut the miniOne represents the vanguard of this cloning revolution. If I made a good impression, I would be invited to the company’s headquarters and research facility on the mainland. The miniOne was going to be on display at the fair, and Jack Wong, Meizu’s CEO, would also be there. Meizu cloned Apple’s iPod Nano last year, establishing itself as a significant force in a music-player market far larger than Apple’s: international consumers who had little access to either Macintosh computers or the iTunes music store. We had been trading e-mails for weeks, negotiating access to the miniOne and the operation that produced it. Ella Wong, a marketing manager at Meizu, the Chinese company building the new phone, had invited me to come to the annual Hong Kong Electronics Fair only days before it began this April. I made a hastily arranged flight to China to find out. Was it real? When would it go on sale? And most intriguing, could it really be even better than the iPhone? The miniOne’s first news teases-a forum posting, a few spy shots, a product announcement that vanished after a day-generated a frenzy of interest online. It promised to cost half as much as the iPhone and be available to 10 times as many consumers. It worked with nearly every worldwide cellphone carrier, not just AT&T, and not only in the U.S.
#Iclone software#
It ran popular mobile software that the iPhone wouldn’t. The miniOne looked just like Apple’s iPhone, down to the slick no-button interface.
The little gadget was bootleg gold, a secret treasure I’d spent months tracking down.
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