Or at least an iphone 5 is already on sale in China. Not that it's a phone from Apple of course: so it's not an iPhone. But it's certainly a cheeky attempt at carving out something of a market for the firm, Goophone.
As you might guess from the name of the company it's also nothing to do with iOS, the operating system instead being Google's Android. I think it's a pretty good mixture actually, near ripping off the name of one comany while definitely ripping off the design, look and feel, of another. And name of product of course.
As The Registers points out, the company has a habit of doing this. Their current offering, the Goophone Y5 4S bears a remarkable similarity to something designed in Cupertino as well. Clearly there's a little niche here that's worth exploiting.
Two things occur: the first being that while we do know there's about to be a new iPhone we don't actually know yet what it's going to be called. Could be the iPhone 5, could be "new iPhone" Could be the 4X for all we know so far.
The second is that this is an insight into just how far China has to go in defending intellectual property. I've long argued that such protection isn't going to come about as a result of anything that foreigners do. Rather, once Chinese firms are creating such IP that they want to protect then protection there will be. And not until then either.
