By Star Chang, posted Jul 20, 2011 at 10:36 AM, 627 views,

Alibaba to Launch Its Own Smartphone

E-commerce giant Alibaba is planning to launch its own smartphone by the end of this month. The new Aliyun smartphone will be based on Andriod and it will be e-commerce and cloud-oriented. In association with chipset supplier Nvidia and Chinese cellphone vendor K-Touch, the phone will be equipped with Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core CPU, the appearance and design of the phone will be trendy. The expected price range will be about RMB 2800 (US$430)…

Alibaba’s new smartphone will be curated by AliCloud, one of Alibaba Group’s subsidiaries focusing on cloud computing research. Recently, several tech sites in China have already got a sneak preview of the Aliyun mobile OS, replete with Alibaba-developed apps such as Aliyun Notes, Ali Mail and a dedicated app store. An interesting feature on the Aliyun phone, compared to those standard Android smartphones, is that the search button has been replaced with the dedicated cloud button (using the Chinese character ‘云’).

The new dedicated cloud button has a classic design on Chinese character.

Aliyun mobile OS is based on Andriod with custom UI, and standard apps will be self-developed by Alibaba.

Alibaba is probably best known for running e-commerce site, but the Chinese company is thinking about moving into the smartphone operating system business. AliCloud operating system would be expected to run apps hosted on a remote server, instead of downloading native apps to their phones. China is a different market though, as evidenced that over 50 percent market share still held by Symbian. A cloud-based OS without apps might have the chance to success in China.

Source: Tencent Tech, Tencent Digital