The iRobot Tablet Forced Me To Cry ‘iPad Clone’!

This little has put me in a tight situation! I’ve really been trying to get away from branding every Chinese made that came along as an . Sure I’ll always make the comparison to the iPad, but I’ve really been trying to keep away words such as fake, knock-off, and copy when introducing them, but now we have real images of the and I can’t but point out it’s obvious forgery of the Apple .

From the outward appearance you get the usual look, but that’s to be expected, all tablets have large black bezels and touch screens as default.

The back however does whiff of cloning! There’s no real need to made the rear look like a 3G iPad, although the black plastic antenna shroud is functional in improving signal strength. The 30 pin connector also looks familiar as do the speaker holes and mesh. It’s not all the same though as the gets 2 speakers (stereo! the is mono!) an mini USB and a Micro SD card reader.

When we look at the size of the compared to the we see a real difference. The looses almost 2 inches of real estate to the iPad, which either means the is more portable than the or more cramped when in use. In this case I’m taking the glass half empty approach and saying it’s cramped to use and hardly brings any extra functionality to the . A good sized smart phone would be easier to carry and applications would look pretty much the same on a 4 inch touch as they would on the iRobot’s 8 inch touch . It’s when we boot up the though that we can’t but scream ‘Clone’, ‘Fake’, ‘Knock-off’. The Android O.S has been heavily and successfully skinned to imitate iOS on the complete with . The only big give away is the distinctly Android task bar at the top of the .

And finally there’s the packaging! What more can we say!

So from now on I’ll try my best not to stamp every Chinese tablet with the iPad clone tag, unless they fall in to the iRobot camp of full immersion cloning!
Images courtesy of Shanzhaiben
Words Andi Sykes
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