Meizu's much hyped (by them, anyway), but still yet to materialize, M8 Mini One iPhone knockoff got some publicity this week at the big CeBIT show in Hanover, Germany. German police shut down Meizu's and confiscated their goodies in the middle of the show. While the blogosphere assumed the raid was thanks to the M8 Mini One's incredible similarities to Apple's iPhone (seriously, the M8 looks like an iPhone knockoff right down to the UI and onscreen icons), it turns out that the furor was sparked by an Italian companies complaint that a Meizu portable media player was using the MP3 codec without a license.
According to Engadget, the Meizu booth was reopened for business and even featured a non-working prototype of the M8 Mini One along with a very rough engineering sample of the phone's UI running off a circuit board. At this point the whole M8 thing is little more than a running joke, and honestly is only still a curiosity in that I can't help but wonder if it'll actually get close enough to production for Apple's lawyers to care about it. I mean, if ever one company blatantly ripped off another's work, this is it.
Read the details on Meizu's crazy adventures at CeBIT over on Engadget.