Is Apple's iPad a Knockoff from Shenzhen Great Dragon Brother's P88, Or Is the Latter A Case Of Pre-emtive Cloning?

Stan Abrams of China Hearsay blogs about Shenzhen Great Dragon Brother's P88, which is very similar to Apple's just released iPad. Mr Abrams, never losing his ironical talent wrote about Shenzen Great Dragon Brother's assertive stance towards IP rights in relation to Apple: "[T]he company apparently filed a design patent, so it’s doing its part to create indigenous IP. All those public education campaigns seem to be working!" Read Mr Abrams' blog here.

Aritz Parra of El Mundo interviewed Mr Wu Xiaolong, CEO of Great Dragon Brother who said that the P88 has been already on the market in China for half a year and was first presented to the world at the International Electronics Fair in Berlin six months ago. Read the article ''Made in China' vs Apple: ¿Quién copió a quién?' in Spanish here.

Earlier, Elaine Chow of Shanghaiist wrote that the P88 was already three months available at the Chinese market, which she calls pre-emtive cloning. Read Ms Chow's article here.

Sometimes Apple has to deal with knockoffs that are better than the real thing, as was the case with the knockoff MacBook Air, read here. Although the P88 has a bigger screen and a much larger disk drive (P88: 160 GB HD versus iPad: 64 GB Flash) and does multitasking and the iPad does not, the P88 has only a battery life of 1,5 hours, while the iPad has 10 hours. Shardendu Gautam compares the technical features for ThinkDigit, read here.

Yesterday, Song Jiang of the site Shanzai.com, that is following the Shanzai (Shan Zhai Ji = 山寨机 , read more about it here ) phenomenon, wrote:

"Just what will happen when the iPad gets launched in China remains to be seen, but I have a feeling that any presiding court in China might just sway in favor of Great Long. This could cause significant ripples in the intellectual property debate surrounding Chinese-made, and more recently, Chinese-designed products and their increasing penetration of traditionally Western dominated markets."

Picture by Shanzai.com.
Read Song Jiang's article here.

UPDATE:

Read Stan Abrams' article 'Shanzhai Saturday: Dawn of a New Era' about double shanzai, read here.