Let’s step back from the iPhone leak suicide for a minute and just think about the basics of what happened. A phone was lost. A guy was tortured. A guy killed himself or something. Over a fucking phone.
During the Lantern Festival last month, one village in China celebrated the same way they have for 500 years—by throwing molten iron at a wall to create showers of make-do fireworks.
We’ve posted about China’s e-waste problem before; a problem that stems from other countries needing to offload their trash and China being more than receptive because of good money to be had from salvaging. But what we haven’t seen much of is video. 60 Minutes tried recently to capture it, but were attacked from Chinese residents that wanted to keep their lucrative e-waste mining business intact. VWag found this longer Current documentary from 2007 that has longer footage—and angry citizens. See for yourself where that old 386 PC you threw away is going. [Current via Valleywag]
A forum poster over at Macrumors has posted photos of a fake iPhone that’s close enough to the real hardware that you might believe it at first glance. Its proportions are off, the screen’s not wide-sized and there’s a mini-USB connector instead of an iPod dock one, but even the packaging is mocked-up to look Appleish. The UI is glossed-up to look very real, with some differences of course. And sure, you can imagine it would be not so sweet to operate… but you can’t argue with the look of the thing. Steve’s famous “start your photocopiers” call has gone a lot further than Redmond. Wonder how soon we’ll see photocopy iPhone 3Gs? [Macrumors]
Seeing as we crapped ourselves twice from just watching this clip, it’s a wonder that this Chinese farmer manages to keep it together while flying this death-trap through the skies. The camera only points rearwards at the guy’s crotch, but that’s probably to show what gigantic balls this guy must have. The guy built this thing out of what looks like dirt and spare parts from broken aircraft, which is pretty much something we wouldn’t want to be riding up 100 metres in the air. This reminds us of Mr. Woo, the Chinese Robot Farmer, who built working robots out of stuff he’s found at the junk heap. [YouTube via MAKE]
A blog on the Wretch.cc network (kinda like a Chinese blogspot) has screens from the Chinese version of iPhone’s 2.0 firmware, detailing the new handwriting recognition. If it’s real, which it seems to be, the new firmware will let people draw in characters with their fingers, then pick the closest approximation among choices that pop up.
Those Chinese cloners have fired up their photocopiers again, this time hunting after big, expensive game: the luxury Vertu phones from Nokia. The Veptu clone phones actually look like the real deal, some even coming with 24k gold-plated cases, leather backs and up to 3.3 carats of embedded diamonds—are these real? Who knows. Each comes with a 176 x 220 TFT display, either a 1.3 or 2.0 megapixel camera and some have Bluetooth. They also have GPRS and play MP3s and MP4s, and come in a variety of dual-band and tri-band GSM setups. However similar they may look, they can’t pack the same build quality: they’re available for between $240 and $710. [Veptu via Bornrich via Chipchick] galleryPost('veptu', 4, '');
We’re not sure how well the Xbox 360 is doing in China, but Microsoft’s cashing in on this whole Chinese New Years business by throwing out a limited edition Chinese New Year Xbox. The box is coloured red, which Chinese people like, but includes Halo 3, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to us. If we were designing a game to include with this box, we’d do something like Viva Pinata, which is kinda festive, or Boom Boom Rocket, which has a whole lot of fireworks. Killing aliens may be fun, but it doesn’t scream welcome to the year of the rat. [CNET Asia]
Until the Meizu M8 is released, this C-002 HiPhone seems to be the most iPhone of iPhone clones out there. As you can see from the video unboxing, it even comes in an iPhone-esque box and has iPhone-like accessories (protective cover, white earbuds). The UI? Well, just watch.
