The release of the Motorola Droid last week is going to create a tough dilemma for many consumers. Should you embrace Android, an open-source OS running on a phone carried by Verizon? Or should you go with the state-of-the-art iPhone, whose platform is tightly controlled by Apple, but nonetheless still has the greatest versatility to date with 100,000 apps and counting?
What if you could have both?
Demonstrated in the video above is an Android-powered iPhone knockoff produced by counterfeiters in China. It’s appropriately (and hilariously) named the “Aphone.” Running Android 1.5, the Aphone features a 2-megapixel camera, a scroll wheel replacing the iPhone’s Home button, and a 3.5-inch touchscreen that appears to be extremely sluggish with responding to gestures.
The person demonstrating the Aphone describes it as “really not bad,” though he admits startup is very slow. To us, compared to the real thing, it looks like a plastic piece of garbage (similar to the shoddy HiPhone we bought a while ago) that does neither Apple nor Google justice. But we’re tickled by the idea: What if someone hacked the legitimate iPhone to run the Google OS? That sounds like a tremendous amount of work, but hackers always pull off the seemingly impossible.
Via 9 to 5 Mac
