• Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, September 7, 2010 10:46 AM

Reporting from Beijing, Joshua Frank reports that Meizu Technology, a young company that is among the horde of Chinese brands that make iPhone knock-offs, is also taking the unusual step of mimicking Apple's marketing strategy. That includes massively hyped announcements, leaked photos of prototypes and creating a mystique around the design. The result is legions of fans at home and abroad.

Enigmatic CEO Jack Wong is rarely seen in public but pops up occasionally in online chats. "Jack Wong is a kind of Steve Jobs character -- it's all a very carefully orchestrated PR campaign," says Chris Ziegler, mobile editor for "Engadget," a tech blog. "Every time [Wong] makes a comment on his company's online forums, there's this groundswell of pandemonium around those posts."

Meizu's first product, the M6 MP3 player, was released in 2006. A knock-off of the iPod Nano, it also featured an innovative vertical touch strip in place of Apple's tracking wheel. Its first iPhone clone, the M8, came out in 2009. The M9, due shortly, has generated a lot of front-end hype -- including clones of the clone that are already on sale -- but the bottom line is that Meizu controls only 0.9% of China's fragmented sector for smartphones.

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