I’m old enough that I’ve stopped giggling at Chinglish in most of its forms, but I hold a still hold a pecial place in my heart for the way the knock-off shops of Shenzhen will mutate and mutilate the iPhone’s branding when slapping a name upon their crappiest phones. Perhaps why I love it so much is that, unlike Chinglish, these guys know exactly what they are doing.
Consider, for example, the iPhoue, found at the notorious Shanzhai Market by our friends over at M.I.C. Gadget. Instead of going through all the hard work of releasing a competent phone, these guys just contented themselves with turning the “n” in “iPhone” upside down, slapped an Apple logo on the handset, dusted their hands and called it a day, without even considering the hysterical pronunciation of the resulting “brand.” Gentlemen… meet the iFoo.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
