How to identify faked Nokia N900

There have already been too many times delay of Nokia N900’s shipment day. It seems that Nokia has some trouble to launch its flagship smartphone, which is expected to be a competitor of Apple iPhone, Motorola Droid and Palm Pre.

Anyhow, Nokia N900 is getting closer and closer to customers eventually. There are already a lot of advertisement of “unlocked Nokia N900″ on Twitter and other websites. The price on most famous online shopping websites, such as amazon, is about 650 USD to 650 Euro (without contract). However, there are also many websites, which are not so well known, give a price like 200 euro or something close. I didn’t look into details but I really doubt the “N900″ they are selling are some kind clone mobile phones according to what has happened to iPhone or many others.

To people who are really familiar to smartphones, it is impossible to be fooled by these copycats. But to some people don’t read technology news at all, it can happen. To avoid this, there needs to be somebody telling them checkpoints to look at. Here are some tips I can think about:

The Maemo5 OS is a very obvious checkpoint for technology guys but too complex for most people;
The 800×480 screen resolution of N900 is another spec those clones wouldn’t have, but not all inexperience users could tell the difference with their eyes;
N900 supports 3G/3.5G and WiFi, but this needs network coverage to check;
N900 has dual LED flash for it camera, which is a very good identification to me;
N900 has a front camera, which is another easy to recognize feature;
N900 is supplied with a 3.5 mm jack to CVBS video/audio cable, which could be the easiest way to find out whether the mobile phone is really from Nokia.

In fact, these mobile phones themselves are not bad. With a price about 100 USD, they provide pretty nice features. But if somebody bought them as real iPhone or N900 for something like 300 USD, it becomes a disgusting scam.