This iPhone 5C Clone Runs Android 4.2

The iPhone has become Japan’s best selling smartphone, with a 37% share of the market reported in November. Its popularity has prompted copycats to launch their own version of the colourful iPhone 5C. The “only problem” is . . . they are running Android.

According to the Japanese blog Ascii.jp (via CNET), Japan’s Iosys will start marketing a smartphone that looks exactly like the iPhone 5c on Friday. There are two main differences, though: it costs only a fraction of the iPhone 5c’s price, and the operating system differs from what you find on the Apple-made iPhone 5c.

Yup, it runs Android 4.2 instead of Apple’s iOS 7. Oh, and it is called ioPhone5, instead of iPhone 5c.

However, if you start looking at the tech specs, other differences pop up: the ioPhone5 sports a 480 × 854 resolution screen, 512 MB of RAM, a dual-core Mediatek chip, 4 GB of flash storage and a 2-megapixel camera.

From the outside the ioPhone5 and the iPhone 5c look almost identical, but their prices are very different: the ioPhine5 starts at $150 (15,490 yen).