From the same people who brought you the Chinese iPhone-wannabe, the HiPhone, the HiPhone Nano is currently being sold in China for $125, which is an immediate discount from its $400 price tag. However, calling it a clone would be a misnomer as it doesn't use the same user interface as the OS. With a 2.4-inch screen, the Tri-band HiPhone Nano supports dual-SIM cards, has a camera and bluetooth, and is apparently also a flip phone. Really, a flip phone? Apple fangirl does not approve. [Product Page via Wired]

Absolutely not.

After all, cloned animals or people are not the real thing, no matter how much they look like the source material. Nothing can't replace the original. But even if they were able to clone them complete with memory and personality, aren't there enough amazing dogs in the world to adopt?

Edgar and Nina Otto—who have nine other dogs, 10 cats, six sheep and four parrots in West Boca (no kidding)—thought otherwise. That's why they paid that much cash to clone Lancelot—their beloved Labrador—who died from cancer. A company called BioArts International—partnering with South Korean researcher Dr Hwang Woo-suk—created Lancelot Encore, which is the actual name of Lancelot 2.0. Or better said, Lancelot 1.0 Remastered.

Woo-suk took the genetic material from the original Lancelot—which was extracted when the couple learnt he had cancer—and replaced the genetic material of an egg from a Korean breed similar to the Labrador. After implanting it into a surrogate mother, the cloned Lancelot was born. After that, he was shipped to Miami International, where he became the first single-birth commercial dog clone ever in the United States, according to his parents.

According to Edgard and Nina, he's exactly like the real thing, and has established himself as the alpha male among the other pets the moment he came into the house. To be honest, if I was another dog I would be freaked out to find alive the dog I thought was dead. [Daily Mail

When we asked them whether they could install a plan retail copy of Leopard you purchase at the store onto their hardware without modification, they said "no." The only legit way of actually being "open" is to modify hardware to fool Leopard into thinking that you're putting it on a Mac. In this sense, Open Tech is the exact same as Psystar, and both will most likely be smacked down by Apple. $500 is too much to pay for this company. [Wired]

The Guardian also finds it weird that Apple hasn't responded at all. Does Apple know that they're a fake company? Is Apple planning something behind the scenes? Either way, this whole situation smells worse than Benny Goldman in the tub.

Do we have any Giz readers around there? Shoot me an email if you are. Thanks guys! Got your emails. [Guardian]

The first official clone experiment in 1995-97 was going so well, and then Steve Jobs swooped in and killed it by raising the licensing price of the operating system and ROMs to impossible levels. And that de facto ban is seemingly here to stay. As late as last year, Apple VP Phil Schiller declared, "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac."

Now, Apple can do whatever it wants. The company can carelessly delay the introduction of new Core 2 Duo processors by a couple of months, and there's a captive audience that will sit there and wait. Mac notebooks, no longer worthy of being called laptops, can fry users' laps, and Mac users have no recourse. Apple can charge whatever price it desires; everyone will pay. And where are the Octo-Macs? We've been testing and playing with the 8-core PCs for six weeks now.

Let's toss out a few ideas, and get some comments.

Let Apple make its hardware money with iPods, and let the clones return, bringing forth more innovation and letting people modify their Macs the way it's commonly done in the PC world. Suddenly, the nearly-infinite variety of PC hardware would be open to the Mac OS.

Sure, Apple can continue to sell workstation and laptop hardware, and if it's so great, it will continue to dominate. But let the free market decide how good the Mac hardware really is. Apple has undoubtedly excelled with iPods; and it would probably survive in a competitive market for its workstation and notebook hardware as well.

On the other hand, maybe Apple is in the catbird seat right now, with its hardware able to run Windows XP, but not reciprocating by letting the Mac OS run on PC hardware—at least not in any official sense that would let diverse hardware manufacturers in on the fun. This is a good situation for Apple, but not necessarily for OS X users.

Hackers and do-it-yourselfers are already unofficially running Mac OS X on Wintel hardware. But let's see an officially-sanctioned Mac clone marketplace where OS X and Microsoft Windows Vista can compete head-to-head, and let the competition between hardware vendors sort itself out. That would be a sure-fire way to finally get out of the quagmire of a sub-5% market share for OS X. – Charlie White