Don't want to wait until April to get a Samsung Galaxy S5? You can get a smartphone that's pretty close, right now — but buyer beware.
Goophone, the notorious China-based maker of smartphone impostors, is already offering a phone for sale that looks almost exactly the same as Samsung's latest flagship — right down to the perforated metal back. The price: just $299.99, unlocked.
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The Goophone S5 is almost identical to the Galaxy S5 on the outside, with one slight difference: The screen measures just 5 inches diagonal instead of 5.1 inches, although both are still full HD (1,920 x 1,080). The exterior is shaped like the S5, and it even comes in similar colors: black, white, gold and blue.
Inside, however, is a completely different ballgame: Instead of a 2.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor, there's an 2GHz octa-core MediaTek chip. There's no LTE, either: The Goophone is a purely 3G device, and it doesn't support 802.11ac Wi-Fi, just b/g/n. The rear camera is also less capable: 13 megapixels to the Galaxy S5's 16. The software is Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean), and storage is 32GB.
If you think those specs still don't sound too bad, you'd be right. The Goophone has the hardware capabilities of any flagship phone from about a year ago. While the lack of LTE connectivity is a serious hindrance to U.S. customers, in many parts of the world, LTE is either scarce or nonexistent. In those markets, a 3G phone will suit most people just fine.
From the photo, it even looks like there's some kind of light where the Galaxy S5's heart-rate sensor is, although the site makes no mention of the functionality, so that's probably not on board (Samsung claimed its S5 was the only smartphone on the market with that feature). Also not mentioned: any kind of fingerprint sensor built into the home button.

Image: Goophone

Goophone copies the design of many popular smartphones, offering Android-powered knockoffs at discount prices by stuffing them with cheap, off-the-shelf parts (MediaTek chips, for example, are known for powering many of the world's low-end mobile devices, including over 220 million smartphones). The company's Goophone i5S, for example, is a dead ringer for the iPhone 5S but costs just $159.99 (and runs Android 4.2).
So how does the company get away with it? The short answer: It's in China. Although the U.S. and China have trade agreements that theoretically protect intellectual property, in practice, Chinese authorities show little eagerness to crack down on knockoffs, as anyone who's visited the Huaqiangbei area in Shenzhen can tell you.
That said, if you're looking to buy a Galaxy S5 with all the features, there's no way around waiting until its official release. But if you'd like something that looks like the S5 and works more like, say, an HTC One, you could do worse than the Goophone S5 — at least on paper. However, you're in for a wait for that phone, too, since as of Wednesday evening, the site lists the phone as out of stock.

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