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Its the biggest product launch of the year: a Chinese company is selling a BlackBerry-like device with promotional assistance from none other than the president of the United States.

‘Obama’ Endorses Chinese ‘BlockBerry’

Okay, not really. But thats the idea behind this ad, the latest emanation from Chinas zany shanzhai culture, a mixture of old-school copycatting and arch parody.

The ad promotes a smart phone called the BlockBerry 9500 (, xuanfeng, means whirlwind), that more-than-slightly resembles the BlackBerry Storm, Research In Motions first touch-screen device, released last fall. The touch-screen BlockBerry purportedly runs on Windows Mobile software, has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and 3G wireless capabilities, and comes in six colors, from purple to champagne. Obamas BlackBerry. My Blockberry 9500, reads the tagline below the presidents photo (which is inverted, apparently by a sloppy layout designer, with the American-flag pin backwards on the wrong lapel). China Journal admittedly hasnt verified this with Robert Gibbs, but well go out on a limb and say that Obamas presence in the ad is unauthorized.

So whos behind the BlockBerry and its clever marketing — and is it even for real? As with many shanzhai products, the maker seems to prefer anonymity. The ad claims it comes from HAFF-COMM, or (another shanzhai touch: , or ha fo, is Chinese for Harvard), but no such company comes up in searches on baidu.com or google.cn. So we spoke to someone at mobileuncle.com, the Chinese gadget chat site where BlockBerry appears to have first been noticed, spawning a host of other posts in the blogosphere.

Our mobileuncle contact, who didnt want to be identified, claims to have spoken to the BlockBerrys maker, which he says provided him with the ad poster and information about the device. He says the producer is a factory in Shenzhen that isnt called Haff-Comm (fake name), and that BlockBerry is scheduled to go on sale next month for less than 1,500 yuan each (about $220). The BlockBerrys makers saw news stories recently about Obamas well-known love of the BlackBerry, he says. They were inspired by the news and decided to market it this way.

Is all that accurate? We cant vouch. In a shanzhai world, we may never know for sure.

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