As you no doubt know over in China they are not averse to cloning tech gear, and Apple’s iOS smartphone has seen its fair share of copycat handsets over in China, and of course the company’s latest iOS smartphone, the iPhone 5 was also been cloned by the Chinese knock-off merchants around about the time the Apple handset was released. And now a new clone of the iPhone 5 has surfaced in China.

According to an article over on Chinese site Mtksj (translated), this new iPhone 5 clone is known as the i5 and is from Chinese handset maker Jingxian, and this iPhone 5 knock-off will apparently become available over in China in January 2013 and command an starting price of roughly $230.

That $230 price tag for the Jungxian i5 seems quite cheap for an iPhone 5 clone and so you probably wouldn’t be expecting too much specification wise, but surprisingly the clone will come out to play sporting a 2GHz Mediatek MT6589 quad core processor, however it probably will not deliver on real time performance as it is based on older ARM architecture.

Also when it comes to the touch screen, it is a tad disappointing that the display on the Jungxian i5 is roughly 4-inches with a 1135 x 640 pixel resolution, whilst the rest of the specs include an 8 megapixel rear facing camera, 1GB of RAM, a PowerVR SGX 531 graphics processor, whilst just like the real iPhone 5 the Jungxian i5 will be available with on-board storage options ranging from 8GB right up to 32GB.

And if you are over in China and those specs still don’t excite you, perhaps the Jungxian i5 coming out to play sporting none other than Android Jelly Bean 4.2.1 will grab your attention. So if you are an Android fan that would like an Android smartphone that looks like the iPhone 5 perhaps the Jungxian i5 will be the clone device for you.

Of course even though the Jungxian i5 clone offers fairly reasonable specs and probably a very attractive price tag, the phone is still just a clone and isn’t the real deal iPhone 5, and a clone, no matter what it offers will always only be a clone. But no doubt there will be many over in China that would be quite happy owning an iPhone 5 knock-off rather than having to shell out for the real thing.