Google's China Rival To Create Android-Like OS 130
Stoobalou writes "Google's biggest search rival in China — homegrown market leader Baidu, is to develop a Linux-based smartphone to rival the Californian search giant's Android-based devices."
Brilliant move, and actually good for Google (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
What's the point? It would be so much easier to just use android and set Baidu as the search engine (since I'm sure that's the motivation behind this).
Nah. Imagine a repressive government having control of the OS in your phone. Could you trust that your phone isn't reporting its location behind your back? (iPhone does but that is anonymous and can be disabled)
There are so many nefarious things that could be done my tinfoil had needs another layer.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
And I was wondering why they would necessarily want to make their own smartphones at all. Google, the company, happens to be in the search business and the smartphone business (among others). Baidu happens to compete with them on search. Is there a reason, other than some irrational copycat strategy, that they would want to go and compete with Google in other markets?
I guess this could coincidentally be the profitable choice for them, but it leaves the impression that Baidu is trying to horn into Google's market as an end unto itself.
Re:Wait, this is coming from China right? (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually work with Baidu to collect marketing metrics. Google, Yahoo, and Bing all have API access setup so clients can access reports anytime via a SOAP request. Baidu? You have to actually talk to a person in China on the phone and ask for a report which they then send you manually every day. God knows if the data is legit, and there is no availability on weekends or holidays (which it turns out, China has a LOT of).
I don't really see how they are going to develop their own mobile OS unless its a direct copy of Android.
Re:Wait, this is coming from China right? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is article is click-bait. Mainland China has already said over a year ago that they were forking version 1.6 of Android (and more recently a second fork from version 2.x) and re-branding it completely (stripping out google maps, google search, etc). This is a fact that Google was quite happy with at the time. Even if it's not technically called Android, or technically figuring within their official figures for Android adoption. It was something that they bragged about. Google was delighted to hear that 1.8+ billion people were going to standardize on something derived from their OS.
If there is anything new here, it's that Google lost some key employees to Baidu (which is not a big surprise considering the recent circumstances). Or it would be that Baidu decided not to copy a rebranded fork of Android, and decided to make their own mobile OS from scratch (just so they could give a slap in the face to Google), but that, the article doesn't make that clear, so I'm just going to assume that Mainland China is just going to stick to its original plan.