How to make an iClone for less than $20

Let there be music

Much like the last section, this is an app that may not work on your handset. It’s also not required to make the phone into an iClone, but if you want a music experience like that on an iPhone, this is the app you want.

Available for a little bit under $2, bTunes will emulate the look and feel of the iPhone and iPod Touch music player, even downloading album art, supporting voice commands, and featuring lockscreen controls.

Because we’re using a custom lockscreen, we need to turn off the lockscreen controls, as these will conflict.

You can also ignore this app altogether and just go with whatever music application you want, including the one that came with your phone. If it came with a widget – like many of them do – you can add this control widget to your iPhone-esque custom lockscreen with WidgetLocker, letting you control your music without unlocking your phone.

But wait, there’s more!

At this point, we’d be pretty happy with our iClone. We’ve dealt with most of the core functions that make the handset look like an iPhone and would finish there, but you don’t need to.

You can go forward and make the phone dialer and SMS area look like it does on an iPhone with Go Contacts and Go SMS Pro, free applications that allow you to change the look and feel of those sections on an Android handset.

There’s another application – iPhone Notifications ($2) – that can even give you pop-up notifications for calls and messages the way it happens on an iPhone.

You can even add a Siri clone with either Jeannie or Iris (both free), allowing you to say things directly to your phone and have them performed by the handset.

But there’s a reason why we stopped before this section: ultimately, these modifications can be harder for beginners to work with and setup.

When we experimented with these applications, we found that while they worked well, they often resulted in some clashes. The messaging programs would, for instance, give us duplicate message notifications. We found the notifications wouldn’t even work with the lockscreen that we’d worked so hard to make.

And we still – annoyingly – haven’t found a way to change the call answer screen so that it resembles an iPhone version. We’re sure there’ll be a way soon, but this isn’t an iPhone, so we don’t imagine it’ll be around until someone else programs it.

But that’s the key: this isn’t an iPhone, it’s an Android phone that we can make look like an iPhone, and if you’re ok with that – if you just want the look, the layout, and little cost – you’ll have that.