Necrothread, but it's still relevant to me.
I bought one of these back in early 2012 because I liked the iPhone 4S styling, but not the price tag or the restrictions Apple places on iOS devices. Upgrading to the Goophone Y5 from my trusty and battered Huawei Sonic, I was duly impressed. The display was amazing, the touch screen was highly responsive and the system was adequately fast. It looks exactly like an iPhone 4S, right down to the branding on the rear panel. It might be a smidgen thicker than a 4S, but every single Apple accessory I bought for it fit like a glove - from cheapie transparent acrylic cases to an Otterbox Commuter case all designed for the 4S. It takes a standard Apple 30 pin cable and fit just fine into the slightly clunky FM unit I'd installed in the car for my old iPod Touch 4G. It's stupidly close - so close in fact that I performed the battery upgrade to an OEM iPhone 4S battery. The camera is great even though it's only a 5Mp rear cam. One massive advantage it has over the Apple devices, apart from the obvious, is that you can install a microSD card to up the storage space to a whopping 64Gb. Like all Android devices, you plug the device into your computer and select USB storage mode to quickly and painlessly explore the device and transfer files to and fro.
That's the good. Now the bad - Out of the box, the Y5 was in Chinese, which makes sense since it's a Chinese domestic market product. You can change to English easily enough, but not everything translates. Some system apps for instance are in Chinese and to this day I have no idea what they do. The settings menus start out in English and quickly devolve into Chinese. The native Android 4.0 iPhone skin which came with the device is clunky and a bit crap, so you need to root the device and flash a new ROM. I did that and ended up with a very close clone of iOS 5.1. However the GPS wasn't working and there were a myriad of little tweaks which needed to be performed to get basic functionality out of the device. As an Android noob who'd never rooted a phone or flashed a ROM before, this was a steep learning curve and it took me about three weeks to get the device to where I wanted it. It STILL doesn't have Gmail or Google Play installed so I have to fix these.
I ended up putting the Goophone in the desk drawer and bought a genuine iPhone 5 which I used for a couple of months until I became sick and tired of Apple's constant sh!t and sold it. I've since upgraded to a Galaxy S4 and my mother, who is not tech-savvy at all and could not drive her HTC Wildfire S phone (literally missing calls because she couldn't "lift the ring" and ending up in that google voice search app when she finally did get past the screen lock. It's been a nightmare for her, so I figured an Apple device would be perfect since they are designed for the lowest common denominator - the extremely untechie user who doesn't even know how to change the ringtone on their new iPhone 5S or whatever the next incarnation will be. I think the Goophone Y5 will be perfect for her. It's got the simplistic user interface and because it's an Android device, it's gives access to the back end so sorta techie types such as myself can fix things we break without having to take it in to a "genius".
So would I buy a Goophone Y5 again? Hell no! It's much screwing around just to get the thing functional and in English. Even though they are dirt cheap now because of the iPhone 5 clones, I really don't think it's worth the hassle unless you're a wiz at all this Android sorcery.
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