Are fake iPods getting better?

Most of the fake iPods we have seen previously have always been visibly cheap clones, this one found by Ipodfun.de had also cropped up on ebay and has to be one of the best we have seen so far.

It was offered a few times on eBay germany without notice that it isn’t the original product, but the memory size of 256 megs was described correctly. Besides the capacity, the whole description on eBay was an automated translation of the original product description from Apple. They sold it for about 10 - 12 euros with additional 25 euros shipping cost, so overall the price was about the half of the original shuffle with twice the memory.

As you can see in the pictures, the poor manufacturing quality stands far away from the original. The edges are sharp, it doesn’t fit smooth into the USB port, the buttons are not so easy to use as on the Apple product. It does not work with iTunes nor does it play AAC or Audible files, but MP3 and WMA files work fine.

Whilst the die hard apple fans obviously wouldn’t fall for a product like this, it could be quite hard for a ‘first time ipodder’ or for the newbie ordering off ebay.

Full article & more pictures @ iPodfun.de

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