In what should come as no surprise to anyone, the Chinese manufacturer known as GooPhone has announced its intention to rip off the iPad Mini on day one. GooPhone is a Android phone manufacturer that puts a lot of effort into copying Apple; not just in terms of hardware, but also in terms of software and interface. GooPhone will call their 8″ tablet the GooPad Mini.

The most wonderful thing about stealing another manufacturer’s design is you don’t need to come up with new pre-rendered promotional images…

What’s scary is that the GooPad Mini, at least on paper, looks to have better specs than the iPad Mini. The GooPad Mini will be rocking a dual-core 1.4 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage. Assuming the iPad Mini will have the same specs as the iPad 2, it will be limited to a 1.0 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 SOC with 512MB of RAM. Even scarier, the GooPad Mini will apparently sell for $99.

That said, not all processor architectures are made equal. The GooPhone’s unnamed processor might have a higher clock speed but it might not have the GPU muscle of the iPad 2′s A5 processor and there could be other bottlenecks. The GooPhone also cuts corners with it’s 2MP rear camera and 0.3MP front camera, (compared to the 5MP and 1.2MP cameras on the iPad Mini), 8GB of storage, and apparent lack of a bluetooth radio. It does, however, seem that the GooPad Mini will be using Android 4.1 with iLaunch (GooPad’s iOS knockoff launcher). The GooPad is expected to release in November.

With that in mind, the announcement was made through a poorly edited YouTube video. Until I see a working prototype, count me as skeptical of the knockoff tablet.

How do you feel about the GooPad Mini? Do you think the $99 price tag is too good to be true? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.