A few years ago cloning was synonyms with Dolly, the beloved cloned sheep. If only Dolly knew back then that her 15 minutes of fame would be robbed by, well… the next cloned object to be, the iPhone.

Originally we thought we’d do a nice informative segment on all the Dolly sheep clones, but quickly found out we where unable to tell the difference in looks and features among the sheep as it became apparent that Scottish scientists do a much better job at replicating stuff than Chinese factories.

Instead, with dawning of iPhone 2.0 we decided to pay tribute to all the original iPhone-Dolly’s out there, and count down the Top Asian iPhone 1.0 clones:

7. C-002 HiPhone - The Dolly to my iPhone

HiPhone is such a iPhone knock off, You’d swear this baby was made by a bunch of Scottish scientist !

6. HiPhone S688 - The Dolly to Dolly

5. Cect P168- iPhone goes Surround  !

Take the iPhone, replicate everything about it and add well … Surround sound ! (huh?)
How’s that for catching ya off guard ?

4. Desay N8 - Shake Shake Shake

That’s not an iPhone owner suffering turrets syndrome , it’s the Desay N8 with full on shake control!
Nothing says hey baby can i have your number like a few twitches.

3. Maxspeed MAK003 - I’m watching you !

Maxspeed decided to clone the iPhone, take that home button and put to better use by turning it into a freaky glowing red eyeball thingy…

2. Cent Dual - Take that Locked iPhone !

While the original Apple iPhone is locked down to it’s providing carrier, Korean Cent Dual replicates the iPhone, offers it unlocked and, you ready … packs in a DUAL sim card holder ! Pure genius..

1. Meizu M8 - The Mongoose to my Snake

Still pretty much a prototype and not yet available, this baby went from being a typical run in the mill iPhone clone featuring the usual Multi touch, auto screen orientation and other standard iPhone features, to having it’s user interface fully redesigned and packing on features the original iPhone was missing, including:

• Video Camera Function
• Native Games
• External Keyboard
• USB Host
• TV Out ports
• Line In for Audio Input
• Fully featured blue tooth Connectivity
• Embedded GPS Chip

Could it be that the hunter becomes the hunted ?

Follow this beast on this active Meizu M8 forum thread

HTC’s has a new Diamond in it’s series of Touch-Flo phones.

Allow me for a moment to skip over the bells and whistles HTC managed, every so skillfully, to pack into this diamond (GPS, Wifi, Kababajillion-bytes of memory, HSDPA to name a few) and instead focus on the crux of the post iPhone phone timeline: Touching

If you’ve ever used any of the previous Touch-and_not_so-Flo series of phones from HTC (Touch Dual, Touch Cruise, MDA Touch, etc...) you quickly realize that while the interface it’s self is not to shabby (I’m actually a fan of the cube) the responsiveness and feel of interacting with the phone through touching could be described in a lot of ways, non having flo .

I’ve always been an advocate of the importance of instant feedback when it comes touch based interfaces, it’s the instinctive thing we expect, after all we don’t touch something in real life in hopes that the reaction is maybe experienced this century, if at all .

What has been so great about the iPhone is it’s responsiveness. Till this day , it leaves me at awe. In the true apple sense , it just works.

Back to our diamond, while HTC has been making great stride to improve CPU speeds on it’s phones, more importantly (i think) HTC have been working ever harder on  it’s graphic acceleration capabilities , which is a key factor in responsiveness of touch based interfaces.

While we will be getting our stock unlocked HTC diamond phones pretty soon for a full-hands on review. Youtubing i found the following video:

Ok ok… it’s no iPhone yet, in-fact you can argue responsiveness is still slightly sluggish relative to Apple’s wizkid, however you have to admit there’s a vast improvement in the user experience offered by HTC’s Diamond over it’s predecessors.

Now entertain the following :

HTC Goodies  + iPhone grade responsiveness + All the great WM software already out there = Dare i say, iPhone Killer

While i’m no where close to calling HTC diamond an iPhone killer, i really do think if HTC keeps moving in the direction it is, Apple might soon run out of the exclusive sweet mojo that’s been powering it’s iPhone and might actually need to start opening up it’s platform and innovating in ways other than it’s interface to be able to truly compete in this super competitive industry , especially against the big boys that have been around for quite some time and are not bounded to a single carrier as their distribution platform.