I suppose beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I think these ugly, bulbous vehicles look more like something Woody Allen would have driven in Sleeper than something you’d see rounding the track at Nürburgring. That said, you’d hope that at least they’d do the cell phone thing well.

I’m not holding my breath on that one either. These things sport an anemic 2-inch LCD screen, and a camera which offers “200 lacpixel; support to shoot MP4 with sound, the time depends on storage, with front camera, flash, telescopic cameras” I didn’t know what a lacpixel was before today, but I’m going to assume they meant it was lacking 200 pixels, because this calculation clearly doesn’t apply. It also supposedly has a QWERTY keyboard, but I think they meant they were typing the product listing with one, as there’s clearly none in sight. At least this thing makes phone calls, right?

If you absolutely must have one of these for the sheer novelty of the thing, you can get one over at AliExpress for about $76(USD). Me? I’m going to save my money to buy some soap to go wash my eyes out with.

Now that I’m a few years older (and more mature), I feel like I sort of owe it to them to make amends because of how I made fun of their inadequacies – which is why I’m going to tell them (and all of you other beardless men out there) about the Propia Hige Japanese Fake Beard that’s available from the Japan Trend Shop.

These fake beards are extremely realistic-looking beards that you stick onto your face and just forget, because they’re not the huge and freakishly bushy type. They’re all in the color black, though, so you might have to pass if you’re a blonde or a redhead.

However, faux facial hair doesn’t come cheap though, as a set of three of these beards of your choice is priced at the ridiculous amount of $137(USD).

The thought is the scammers purchased the iPads and replaced the tablets with a block of clay weighing the same as the iPad. Then they rewrapped the iPad in retail-grade cellophane and returned them to the store. Then the retailers returned the units to the shelves. Most stores log the customer’s ID on large returns, so they would have had to be clever about that to not get caught. Best Buy, Apple and Future Shop are investigating the situation. Hopefully this won’t happen to you. Maybe someday they’ll have to start x-raying high-priced items when they get returned to prevent this.

This wouldn’t be the first (or last) fake iPad scam – a while back, a woman was sold a wooden iPad for the low, low price of $180. However, that bait-and-switch didn’t happen at a legitimate retailer.

[via TechCrunch]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Mbbhc9bHsHQ

You can probably find it for free eventually if you really want to try it, over file-sharing networks. And since the real Mario is not available for iPhone, who could blame you.

[via Kotaku via Geek]

The Yinlips YDPG18 [JP] is powered by Android 2.2 and features a 5 inch touchscreen display with an 800 x 480 pixel resolution, a motion sensor, two cameras and 1080p video playback support. It also has a 1.2GHz processor, along with 512MB of RAM. It’s also got Wi-Fi, HDMI and USB built in. Unlike the real PS Vita, it only has a single analog stick, and no rear touch sensors.

As you might expect, you can’t go to your local game shop and buy PS Vita or PSP games for it, so it comes with some emulators, like NES, Gameboy, SNES, Gameboy Advance, N64 and PlayStation One, as well as Flash 10 games. And since it runs Android, you can play those games too. Style-wise it doesn’t look horrible, but I’m sure it plays like garbage compared to the real thing – though it honestly doesn’t look too shabby as an emulator from the videos below:

If you want to play with one, you can grab one from EtronixMart for just $119.99 (USD). Better do it before Sony’s lawyers shut them down.

[Kotaku via Ubergizmo via Geeky-Gadgets]

The Angry Birds PSP Game Console not only craps all over Rovio’s trademarked birds and pigs, but also wants to get Sony’s lawyers into the mix as well, aping the style of their PSP handheld, and even using “PSP” on their packaging.

Ffrom everything I can tell, this thing is like one of those old LCD Nintendo Game & Watch games from the 1970s and 1980s, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that this one sucks.

Now I suppose that with a price of just about $7 (USD), you can’t expect much, but when you think about the fact that Angry Birds can be downloaded for free to 99 cents, and is available on just about every platform out there, it’s a bit of a stretch to figure out why you’d ever buy one of these things. I suppose if you’re one of the three people left in the civilized world without a smartphone or a web browser, you can pick one of these up over at Focalprice for $7.44(USD).

[via Reddit via Geeksaresexy]

This 22 year old woman is in a McDonald’s parking lot, when two guys approach her, offering to sell her an iPad, which was in a FedEx box. They wanted $300. Did she ask to see it first before offering money for it? No. Instead, she offered $180 and these guys took her up on the offer.

Well, big surprise, when she opened the box she discovered a piece of wood with black tape around the edges. On the back was a large Apple logo. It even had a fake screen printed on it, with icons and everything.

The moral of this story is simple: Don’t be stupid. All she had to do was ask to have a look. This ended up costing taxpayers some money too, because the police investigated it. They should have just left it alone. Stupid ends up costing us all.

[via The Smoking Gun]

That high-quality fake Apple store stayed in operation though by simply changing its name. It still has an Apple Store sign inside and all the same decorations. The only difference is that the name on the outside of the building is now Smart Store. Apparently, the person that owns this store was once an official Apple reseller.

The store is now selling grey market products. The license from Apple was reportedly revoked after the store owner started selling the products at a premium to make more money. Other stores in the city changed names also and some went out of business.

[M.I.C. Gadget via TechCrunch]

The Apple Genius, being the genius he is, immediately noted the machine was not a real MacBook Air. I would have expected him to stick his nose in the air and toss the man and his faux Mac to the curb. But that’s not the case. The Apple Genius reportedly fixed the dude’s real technical issue on the fake MacBook.

The only proof of any of this is the photo you see here. Of course, there are fake Apple Stores in China though, so maybe he brought his fake MacBook to a fake Apple Store. This store appears to be real, what do you think?

[via M.I.C. Gadget]

The device looks like a super fat iPhone 4 in white. On closer inspection, the fat iPhone look-a-like is actually a fan. It has a fake screen on the front that is a reasonable looking copy of the actual iPhone 4 screen. The fan is made from plastic and is powered by a mini USB port on the bottom.

A little LED on the bottom tells you when it is plugged in. It appears that the intake is on the back and the place where the air comes out is on the side of the fan. That blue thing is a sponge you have to get wet to the air is cooler. The iPhone fan costs about 10 bucks, and you can grab one over at K.O. Gadget.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[via M.I.C. Gadget]

I appreciate the original “Made in China” stuff that I’ve got though, because you can get some high-quality stuff from there, if you know where to look and if you know who to trust.

Chinese counterfeiters have gotten so good at their craft that it often takes a long time and a good eye to tell the fake product and the original one apart.

For that reason, I advise you to take a long, hard look at the photo above, because that’s actually of a counterfeit Apple Store in Kunming, which is the largest city in Southwestern China. Yes, you read that right, folks: this Apple Store is a sham, copying the design of Apple Stores worldwide and peddling equally fake goods.

If you’re a little skeptical, then the photo above should make a believer out of you. I doubt Steve Jobs’ people who get the spelling for “Store” wrong. The thought of a fake store is pretty crazy, but here it is, right in the flesh (or in the glass and concrete.)

I wonder what Apple’s going to be doing about this, though.

[via Apple Insider]

The iPhone app Monino somehow managed to slip through Apple’s rigorous testing and approval process, allowing this total rip-off of Super Mario Bros. to show up in the App Store. Here’s a clip of the game in action:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Unfortunately, the publicity surrounding the game caused Apple to already yank Monino, so if you didn’t manage to install it, too bad. In all honesty, the controls, gameplay for Monino look godawful compared to the original NES games, and I think I’d throw my iPhone across the room if it kept playing that sound loop over and over, so I’m glad I saved myself the 99 cents. I suppose I could always jailbreak my phone and install a proper NES emulator, or I could just break out the old 8-bit console if I really have a hankering for Mario.

[via Electricpig]

This oddity sort of looks like the iPad 2 from the front, what with that white screen and front-facing camera. Of course, don’t expect this pocket-sized “E-Pad” to live up to Apple’s specs. It’s got a lowly 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen, a 0.3 megapixel front camera, and a 2 megapixel rear camera.

It does have one thing going for it that the iPad 2 doesn’t though – an LED flash. Actually, it’s got Java support and some sort of mobile TV that certainly won’t work here in the States. I wonder if it supports Flash too – meh, it’s probably not powerful enough. This thing is also a dual-SIM GSM phone, so it’s actually more like an iPhone 4 than an iPod Touch.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

It’s also way thicker than Apple’s svelte gadgets. It looks like this thing is at least 1/2 an inch thick. Yeouch.

If you really do want one of these stupid looking things, you should be able to find one on the streets of the Shenzen area of China for about $70 bucks. Good luck with all that.

[via M.I.C. Gadget]

Um, no, not really. But that doesn’t make this parody video by YouTuber Exkild showing off what a 27-inch iPad 2 might look like any less funny.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Which of the “built-in apps” is your favorite? I think I might actually try running iFoodTray on my first-gen iPad.

[Thanks for the tip, LBeto!]

The thing is a fake Louis Vuitton belt with a gold colored buckle. That buckle has a cell phone on it that actually works, though I suspect “works” and “works well” are two different things in this case. The phone has a little display on the top that lets the wearer see who is calling.

There aren’t any specs on the phone to speak of. We do know the thing has a camera inside and that’s it really. You can hit up the video below to see this ugly thing in action.

[via M8Cool via GizChina]

While other Japanese have been busy building another classic robot statue, and South Koreans are building a gigantic robot statue of their own, this orange Gundam copycat is being built in a theme park in Sichuan, China. It might just be the angle of the photograph, but Chinese Gundam looks like he needs to work on his upper body.

[via Livedoor Blog & Sankaku Complex]

From the sleek aluminum case, to the exact same 9.7-inch display found in the iPad, to the single round navigation button, this clone sure looks like the device it’s trying so hard to copy.

Under the hood, it’s a bit different, running an 800MHz Freescale iMX515 chip, which is based on the Cortex-A8 architecture, and sports 512MB or RAM and 4GB of storage. Plus, it’s missing that all-important Apple logo on the back.

But from an app standpoint, it’s nothing like the iPad. Instead of running iOS, the clone runs Android 2.2, which means it can run Flash too.

No word on if or when you’ll ever be able to find this clone outside of China, but if you’re thinking about an iPad and are too cheap to buy a real one from Apple, you’ll just have to make the impractical move of spending a couple thousand dollars on an airplane ticket to China, look for a guy in a dark alley, and ask him if he can find one of these for you.

UPDATE: The guys over at MP4 Nation got their hands on what looks like the same device (with a 10.1-inch screen), and shot some video of the tablet in action:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[via Shanzhai Ben (translated)]

At least we usually save money with the faux products we buy. If you liked that Dyson Air Multiplier fan that has no blades, but choked on the pricey $299 tag, a new knock off has surfaced from a company called Abiko.

The catch is that the MSRP for the rip off is not too far from the price of the real deal. Abiko wants $223 for its faux Dyson. The good news is that CNET News reports you can find the Abiko online (in Wholesale quantities) for just $50 each.

While I actually like the idea of Portal as a text adventure, there’s something especially anachronistic about the Macintosh with a green screen and 5-1/4″ floppies.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

But still, you have to admit it’s amusing. Maybe the L4D commercial is a little more accurate…

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Yeah, the NES didn’t have graphics that looked exactly that, but I’m still glad I watched. Aren’t you? The whole “After these messages, we’ll be right back” bit was worth the price of admission for me.