Meizu Stirs up Rumors at CeBIT

An abrupt closure of Meizu's booth was chalked up to the company's MiniOne iPhone clone, but the truth came out on Thursday.

As if tradeshows weren’t already hotbeds for rumors and speculation, the Chinese manufacturer Meizu managed to accidentally heat things at CeBIT up even further on Wednesday morning when German police shut down its booth and shuttled away all of its devices.

In the wake of the incident, bloggers quickly kicked into gear, reporting that the booth had been closed because Meizu’s M8 MiniOne device infringed on Apple’s iPhone copyrights. The MiniOne, which has been appeared in renders and pictures for a year now but not yet been released, has widely been regarded as an iPhone clone due to its unmistakably similar look and functionality.

As it turns out, according to Heise Online, the shutdown really occurred over a far less interesting product: an ordinary MP3 player. On Thursday, a Meizu spokesperson announced that the problem was with an MP3 player that Meizu hadn’t properly licensed a codec for. As proof, the booth reopened on Thursday, minus the offending product.

As for the MiniOne, it would appear to still be slated for an August release in China, so the real legal fireworks, if any, may be yet to come.