Please meet the Meizu M8, the big aspirational gadget-of-the-week for Chinese consumers, the greatest iPhone clone you’ve ever seen, and still, the biggest mystery in China’s mysterious shanzhai world.

In January 2007, Jack Wong, Meizu’s CEO, claimed that the original M8 design for a massive-touchscreen cellphone debuted four days before Macworld, where Steve Jobs wowed the whole world with iPhone. That the M8 shared an almost identical user interface with Apple’s invention of the year was, he said, coincidental.

In the year that followed, every now and then we’ve been able to find a new video clip demonstrating the Meizu M8 released on Youku - from a huge circuit board with a touch screen, to a laggy prototype, and finally, this stunning video uploaded 19 hours ago:

It’s rumored that the Meizu M8 will be on the shelf later this month with a 3.3 inch 720×480 touch screen (much higher than iPhone’s 480×320) and compatibility with most mainstream multimedia formats you can find online (who needs Apple’s iTunes Store any more?). And my friend from Engadget China told me, the price would be RMB 2300 (USD 335).

But there’s a question posted under the video:”No Wi-fi?” Oh sorry, it’s forbidden to sell mobile phones with Wi-Fi functionality in mainland China. But people on Meizu offcial forum said the module can still be activated by Meizu’s software. What an amazing country!