Gearfuse

When we claimed that Michael Jackson might just be a cyborg, we weren’t that far off. Apparently, MJ was planning to create his very own robotic doppelganger, even going as far as creating blueprints for the mechanical beast.

Detailed 3D scans were made of Jackson’s body before he died with the intention of creating an “eerily-lifelike robotic duplicate.” The late popstar’s robotic builder claims that he will sell the 1996 scans of MJ for anyone willing to shell out a million big ones. This story just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

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Well, not quite. It’s actually an open-source Doom clone called PRDoom. Some sneaky hacker got it working on his Palm Pre, as shown in the above video. Looks like a good way to kill a couple hours at the office on Friday…

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You know how China is a land of freedom in terms of copyright laws, with all those small brands copying Nokia phones and iPhones with the sole consequence of making (good) money. Now how about a big brand copying another big brand, this time being staged in the land of Japan? Jump for more drama.

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LG was sending out warning letters to shops threatening to take legal actions should they sell/ display the Chinese clone of LG Shine, we never understood why they’re so uptight about it until we saw this today.

We learned that the the clone is called Diamond KG70 Shine, and from what we see, it looks almost like the original. With the same silvery finishing, same size, same weight (3g difference), same scroll wheel, same 2.2″ QVGA screen and same 64 chords polyphonic ringtones. The camera is a 1.3 megapixels fixed focus module, a microSD slot that is not found on the original KE870 is also added. This baby is priced just under $100 online, you might want to be quick before LG gets serious. We have a picture of the backside after the jump, which looks just as close as the front.
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Pictured above is the infamous N73-clone, called Nokir E828, produced by a mainland Chinese company (NOKIR) next to the real Nokia N73 (on the right), it has been selling well enough to catch Nokia’s attention. However the company did not have enough evidence to go against the manufacturer and the copyright-protection laws are a bit tricky in mainland China, so instead they decided to bully the tiny tiny shops that are selling the Nokir E828 in Hong Kong. Those poor scapegoats are asked by the representing law firm to relinquish all the stock voluntarily and pay a HKD 30,000 ($3870) fine for the damage incurred. Most of those shops are only run by 1-2 people in a space no bigger than 25 squared feet in Mong Kok (a more ghetto part of Hong Kong). According to the shopkeepers, they’ve been trying to get in touch with Nokia as the deal is not fair, so far they have received no reply.

The Nokir E828 is a dualband GSM phone that houses a 2.6″ QVGA touchscreen and a 2 megapixels camera. MP3 and MP4 are supported and the memory expansion used is microSD. Being smaller and lighter than the N73 (110×55x14mm 105g), the E828 seems to have everything a fanboy would dream of, check out the $100 price tag, too: unbeatable. You’ll have to be very lucky to find any of these after this incident though. –Sam Chan

Link (in Chinese)