China Announces Upcoming Smartphone, OS and App Store
Baidu has announced details of its soon-to-launch new smartphone and the cloud-centric operating system (OS) that will power it. The Chinese search giant says that the move, which will put Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS platforms under pressure in China, will bring about a revolution of affordable smartphones.
The Foxconn-built Changhong H5018 will be the first device powered by Baidu’s ‘Cloud Smart Terminal’ platform, and the company has heralded the phone as marking “the arrival of a new era” of sub $150 (1,000 RMB) devices in China.
There is no confirmed launch date for the device, which will be released “in the very near future”, but, as Baidu executives teased last week, the phone and new OS will integrate with a range of cloud-based services.
Every H5018 phone owner will be given a generous 100 GB of storage on Baidu’s Netdrive, a beta service known locally as Wangpan. The Google Drive-like service will store multimedia content in the cloud whilst linking back to the desktop service, while standard services like Baidu Music, Baidu Map and other applications will come with the phone.