It looked like Intel and Apple were becoming pals, with Intel offering Apple its Core Duo processors for the Mac and even praising the iPhone.

But now Intel said it will be producing cell phone chips that will be marketed to phone manufacturers other than Apple.

On the one hand it looks like Apple’s been stabbed in the back. On the other it seems we consumers are going to have a lot more options in the market next to the iPhone, followed by a better iPhone v2.0 (competition- always a good thing).

Check out this video where Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laughs at Apple’s iPhone, “the most expensive phone in the world,” because, he says, “it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine.”

He’s right, the lack of tactile response could be a killer for iPhone. What do you think?

With all the news of iPhone-inspired mobile phones, I thought I’d put together a list of the five most notable iPhone clones:

1. Meizu miniOne
2. Teclast T59
3. LG Prada KE850
4. ASUS Aura
5. iSoftPhone

See these iPhone competitors reviewed after the jump…

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Apparently Meizu looks up to Apple like a big brother, because just as Apple used the iPhone name despite Cisco owning the iPhone trademark, Meizu’s iPhone clone, miniOne, also happens to share its name with a Venzero portable media player that has been out since last June.

Is Meizu being so aggressive in the hopes of attracting loads of attention via all the negative publicity? It’s working, I’m sure.

I can’t wait to see what happens when Meizu gets pounded left and right with lawsuits.

So I was only half-right about the Meizu M8. It is in fact not real… but only because the real Meizu iPhone-knockoff is named miniOne.

According to Engadget, Meizu’s CEO said on the Chinese Meizu forum that the Meizu miniOne debuted four days before Macworld, after which it underwent a name change and some design tweaks (to make it more like iPhone, duh!).

The Meizu miniOne “upgrades” so far:

Engadget appropriately compared Meizu’s miniOne tweaks to “double-checking your answers with your neighbors’ before turning in your test.”

4 more Meizu miniOne photos after the jump…

Click to read the rest →