The iPhone X notch clones are coming

Apple’s notched screen on the iPhone X has been a polarizing topic of discussion, but no matter where you stand on that debate, you had to know it would be copied to death by Android phone makers. The deluge of knockoff notches got started early with the Leagoo S9 last year, and today we can add the upcoming Noa N10 to the category of wannabe iPhones.

This device is such an obviously hurried ripoff that the one video the company provides to illustrate that it works also happens to show its user interface has zero accommodations for the notch. You can see the N10’s notch oversteps the Android interface’s icons, and on the top right, the clock isn’t entirely visible because of the curved corner of the screen. And if that wasn’t enough, the Noa N10 also has a bottom bezel that the iPhone X lacks.

It was inevitable that Apple’s radically redesigned iPhone would prompt such a response from its (much) smaller competitors. The notch in the iPhone X is used to accommodate the Face ID tech that gives it its technological edge, but for a large swathe of consumers, the notch will simply be an identifier to show that you have the latest, stupidly expensive iPhone. The notch is the status symbol’s symbol.

Other than copying Apple shamelessly, Noa has managed to pull together a pretty nice spec sheet for its new device. The N10 will come with a ceramic casing, “which will offer the users a sensation of prestige and elegance,” and a 3,600mAh battery. Its 64GB of on-board storage will be expandable via a microSD card, and there’s also a dual 16-megapixel camera system (2x Sony IMX499 sensors) and a fingerprint reader on the back. An octa-core MediaTek MT 6763 processor and 4GB of RAM complete the package, which is dominated by a mostly bezel-free display that measures in at 6.2 inches and 2,160 x 1,080 resolution.

The Noa N10 will be presented in full during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month, though we already know that it will ship with Android 8.0 Oreo and will be priced around the €300 ($375) mark. More iPhone X clones and lookalikes are sure to flood the show venue this year, and we’ll be there to cover each and every one of them.