Goophone Of China Claims To Have Patented iPhone 5 Design

Chinese phone maker Goophone gets full marks for cheek. The day Apple’s iPhone 5 launch was finally announced, Goophone promised to have the phone banned in China… because it has already patented Apple’s design there.

Apple has suffered serious trademark and patent issues in China in the past, but the Goophone claim is causing merriment amongst Mac watchers. The Goophone i5 does indeed look much like the leaked iPhone 5. The move has been described by CultofMac as “wonderfully brazen” – but any attempt to enforce a Chinese patent would surely expose where Goophone got the design in the first place… wouldn’t it?

iPhone, Goophone, we all phone

The Goophone i5, which first surfaced in August, looks superficially like an iPhone, but runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Like the expected iPhone 5, it has a 4-inch screen, a smaller dock connector and larger speakers, and external speaker grills, whilst the headphone socket has moved to the bottom of the phone.

Inside, it is thought to have an Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core 1.4Ghz CPU and 1GB RAM.

The i5 isn’t yet on sale in China, however, and is expected in the shops somewhat after the iPhone 5 launch.

Goophone’s site features the words “iPhone 5” prominently in Latin script but its claims to the design seem very weak, especially given the fact that Apple has patents on the shape and style of iPhones going back some years, which have recently been upheld against Samsung in a US court.

GizChina has a video of the device:

Apple has only recently settled a claim over the iPad trademark in China, paying $60 million to Proview, the owner of the term “iPad” there, when Proview threatened to ban any sales of iPads in China.

Meanwhile, the inventiveness of Chinese counterfeiters was shown last year, when they were found to have copied three entire Apple Stores.

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