Monday, 30 July 2018

Review of a $100 counterfeit iPhone X

Motherboard reviewed a "device that looks just like an iPhone but is actually an Android that has been reskinned from top-to-bottom to seem as close to an iPhone as is possible... the phone is also loaded with backdoors and malicious apps."

Once I started trying some of Apple’s more recent and advanced features, though, things started going off the rails. Siri’s graphical interface has been recreated, but it doesn’t really work. My favorite thing about the phone is its “Face ID” system. I clicked over to Face ID in the settings menu, clicked “Add a Face ID,” and was hilariously bounced over to the camera, which did manage to draw a green box around my face. It said “Face Added,” and closed. I was then able to unlock the phone with my face. So was literally anyone else who put their face in front of the phone.

Clicking around further betrayed the phone’s actual software: the keyboard is clearly an Android keyboard; when the reskinned App Store crashed, I got a popup notifying me that the “Google Play Store” had malfunctioned. The “Weather” app is just Yahoo! Weather. The Health App is a third party thing that asked me to click cartoon avatars selecting whether I was a “boy or girl.” The “Podcasts” app just opens YouTube. Apple Maps opens Google Maps.