By Herman Lai, posted Dec 5, 2011 at 12:54 AM, 246 views,

Baidu Yi Smartphone Coming This Month?

We have been looking forward to see Baidu Android-based mobile OS Baidu Yi since it launched in September this year. Baidu Yi features cloud computing, something like Apple’s iOS 5 and Alibaba’s Aliyun. Today, there is rumor saying Baidu to reveal the Yi-based device this month and that’s very likely to be a Dell phone.

At the start of September, we reported Dell and Baidu team up for tablets and smartphones. Although Baidu hasn’t said anything publicly about the new agreement with Dell, but did note that it had existing deals with other device manufacturers. And Dell is the first to have rumor suggesting they committed to build hardware that utilizes Biadu Yi. That makes it very likely that Dell is going to build devices based on Yi.

According to the chart that made by Seeking Alpha, it suggested the Yi-based Dell smartphone will be priced at $3,000 RMB (around $385). It is not too expensive, is sort of in the middle range. The cheapest smartphone that you can get in China is Xiaomi, priced at $2,000 RMB ($256) but doesn’t powered by cloud computing OS, its MIUI ROM is still brilliant though. Then comes after to Alibaba’s Aliyun phone, available at 2680 yuan ($416). The company is going to launch the second-generation Aliyun smartphone by this month as well. In other words, we are going to see a smartphone battle between China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba with the search giant Baidu this month. Who is going to win in this Android-based OS combat? Aliyun or Baidu Yi?

We can see the Chinese tech companies tend to focus on cloud computing and mobile industry this year. Apart from Alibaba and Baidu, other Chinese internet giant Tencent is also putting lots of focus on the mobile industry (Examples: QQ mobile browser) and iQQ Android handset). Will Tencent have their own Android-based mobile OS?

Feel free to tell us what you think…

Source: Seeking Alpha