Along with the iPhone came a new trend that has taken over just about everything. First, there was the “How’s it going to be like?” stage, when no details were revealed to anyone, and dozens of mockups (some closer to reality, some purely fictional) hit the internet, powered by curiosity. Earlier this year, everyone tuned in to MacWorld, where Steve Jobs presented the long-awaited product. Every detail, every photo and every single aspect of the long-awaited “iPod phone” (as Jobs himself says, iPhone is the best iPod they ever made) was covered in thousands of newspaper articles, tv shows, blog posts and so on.

The iPhone hasn’t reached the marked by now, and still there are a couple of rumours regarding (virtual) competitors. Driven by the media attention that the iPhone is getting, rival companies have started work on their own “iPhone”.

The first one sounds more like a joke than a real thing. It seems that, with some 4 months before the iPhone’s release to the masses, the japanese guys from Meizu created a phone that is almost a hundred percent identical to the iPhone. The photos show a smaller phone, with the icons placed in the same way (one icon has the Windows symbol on it, but the writing is in Chinese, so I can’t understand anything from it), with strikingly similar features (except from what looks like a small secondary camera on top).

This is said to be the Meizu M8, and it’s, in my opinion, just an attempt to get some spotlight from the real thing.

Another “would-be” product that caught my eye is the Asus Asura, which is still in a concept phase. Azura has a design which is similar to the iPhone’s design, but in the same time it manages to bring something different to the table. It appears to be a normal, sliding phone (Although I’m not quite sure how this slidin mechanism will look like - it isn’t very clear from the photos), but what it has new is a QWERTY-type keyboard that popsout from one side, allowing the user of the phone to type a lot easier. Between the two models, I would say the latter has a real shot of success, but unfortunately it’s still in a design stage.

As I’ve said, the iPhone hasn’t even been launched to the general public, and already companies are rushing to copy its design and features. This might make it the best selling phone so far, or it might mean that users will get bored of it even before its launch.