Dell and Baidu Introduce a Smartphone With Forked Version of Android

cortex writes "XDA developers is reporting on the release of a new smart phone which runs a forked version of Google's Android operating system: 'Dell and Baidu, the Chinese search giant with over 80% marketshare in its home-country, unveiled the Streak Pro on Tuesday (via Computerworld). The device has a 4.3 AMOLED screen with 960×540 resolution and packs a 1.5 GHz dual-core Qualcomm processor. Most notably, however, is the operating system it runs: a forked Android version dubbed Baidu Yi, which replaces Google's services with those of Baidu.' How will this impact Google's support for Android and open source in general?'

Re:Google will smile and laugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Google didn't "ignore" the chinese market, they pulled out for ethical reasons (present chinese government wanted them to censor).

Re:With the expected Chinese requirements.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't tell if you're trolling or really that poorly informed. For all my complaints about how we do things, your suggestion that the situation in the US is worse than China is patently absurd.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China [wikipedia.org]

Re:Google will smile and laugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Google had a significant portion of the Chinese market before pulling out - over 35% [nasdaq.com]. And even with the current situation where they have much less marketshare, they're profitable [engadget.com]. So basically you're full of shit.

Google had been against censorship all along, but decided to try and change China from the inside. Eventually, they discovered that it wasn't possible, so they stuck up for their principles and took their ball and went home. It's rare that you see a company put principle ahead of profit, and they should be commended for it.

Re:With the expected Chinese requirements.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or he's one of hundreds of thousands of commentators hired by the Chinese government to post pro-Chinese sentiment across the internet. [wikipedia.org]

Baidu is awful

[Anonymous Coward]

Baidu is absolutely laden with spam. The English searches are a little better, those come from Bing rather than Baidu's own engine, no great but passable.

But when I was in Shanghai I used Baidu almost exclusively, because they keep blocking Google. Sometimes Google works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it works but is so ridiculously slow that it's unusable. I know this is not Google making, but the Chinese tricks. However I still need to find things.

It's not a political thing I think, a lot of it is just corruption. It's not that the guy running the routers is such a communist puritan that he favors Baidu comrades, it's that he's such a corrupt person, ten bucks in his pocket and he'll route you through a Pentium 4 firewall! Baidu just know who to pay off.

Re:With the expected Chinese requirements.

[mynickslongerthanurs]

But how do you explain the 80% market share of Baidu?

Because its major competitor is suffering from blatant malicious QoS deterioration?

• Every 15 minutes, any attempt to access google is met with a reset. The blocking lasts 15 minutes, causing an artificial 50% downtime for ALL Google services.
• When the service is accessible, searching for a potentially 'inharmonious' word (including seemly innocuous false positives like 'carrot') resets the connection immediately and deny future access to Google for 5 minutes.
• Don't even THINK about using Google Search over SSL.
• G+ doesn't work. Well, neither does Facebook.
• Blog service (blogspot/blogger) doesn't work. In fact, searching for the word 'blogspot' resets the connection.
• Video service (Youtube) obviously doesn't work.
• No site managed by Google Sites works.

Oh, and I'm a native.