“China Unicom announced a new smartphone and software platform Monday, Wophone, that will rival Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and China Mobile’s Ophone offerings,” Dan Nystedt reports for PC World.
MacDailyNews Take: Woephone.
“China’s second largest mobile operator, with 170 million subscribers, created the Wophone as a way to avoid being marginalized by other mobile industry players that have opened their own app stores, executives from the company have said,” Nystedt reports. “The new handset platform will immediately become a rival to the maker of one of China Unicom’s hottest selling smartphones, Apple. The iPhone 4 debuted in China last year to huge crowds and remained sold out for months.”
Nystedt reports, “China Unicom said its Wophone software is Linux-based and entirely developed by itself and partners, including some Chinese government offices, but does not rely on Android.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Because, you know, if there’s anything China needs, it’s yet another half-assed iPhone knockoff.
Killer App: It automatically records and sends the government hourly updates of your text messages, URL history, and voice recordings.
Very original; in Chinese, “Wo” means “I” or “me”
Oh, wo is me.
Consumer Reports would like them to sell it here. They like anything but Apple.
From Consumer Reports: the Wophone is buggy, sends electric shocks randomly and often catches fire, but according to our tests (crystal ball) it did not loose a bar when held a certain way: so we can recommend it, contrairly to the iPhone 4.
Once again, Google (Android) is kicked to the street by China. I wonder if China can disable all of these phones when they want too?
Is that an uprising? Kill the Wophones! RIMM will shut down due to the load on their own. What to do with what is left. iPhones, hard to kill!!
So they essentially took apart an iPhone and copied it. The phone is really only about one fourth of the puzzle
The other parts are
Security
Developers
Upgrades
Carriers
Does this mean Google will stop counting all those unlicensed Android phones in China as legitimate activations?
In both Simplified & Traditional Chinese the character for “develop” is exactly the same as the one for “steal”
OMFG!
The Chinese are making an Italian cell phone and they are selling it to the Chinese. WTF!
News from Lake Wobegon.
Dear Mr. Wozniak,
I see right through your pathetic attempt to dethrone your former partner. Next time try choosing a less obvious name for your product. Wophone? Really?
As noted above, the word “wo” is the chinese word for “I”. In other words, “wophone” is the same as saying “iPhone”. If this weren’t in China, where foreign companies are disadvantaged in the courts, I’d say Apple should sue for trademark infringement, let alone pull their iPhone contract with Uni-con.
Typical of the Chinese mentality. They’ve been stealing western industrial secrets and intellectual property for decades. A complete lack of morality backed up by a laughable justice system, yet we continue to do business with them.
Who really cares? Apple couldn’t possibly make enough product to sell to all the Chinese who want a smartphone anyway, nor should they even want to. All Chinese who start out with an inferior product because it’s cheap, will aspire to upgrade to an iPhone eventually anyway… it just helps grow the market, albeit with a cobbled together copy.