This Thursday, Alibaba Group released its self developed mobile OS and smartphone. This comes in an attempt at tapping the fast growing mobile internet market in China. Aliyun, the operating system based on cloud computing, will be used in the K-Touch Cloud Smartphone which is expected to be launched in 10 colors at the end of July, according to Wang Jian, Alibaba Cloud Computing’s President. Wang also said at a Beijing presentation that before the end of the year a tablet computer running on the Aliyun OS, which uses a customized version of Android as its base, will be launched in China. He said that Tianyu, a handset manufacturing company, has been given the contract for making the K-Touch phone and the upcoming tablet.
The new mobile platform will include various cloud based services, such as internet search, email and web application support. This will let the users run applications on their device without having to download and install them. Alibaba Cloud is intended to integrate its new operating system with other gadgets such as mobile handsets which have larger screens and tablets in the upcoming days (perhaps similar to the Motorola Atrix).
According to Wang, the company has planned to come out with the tablet running on Aliyun before next year. He said that Alibaba is in negotiations with Qualcomm Inc in order to develop low end chipsets which will be optimized to work with the platform in cheaper cell phones. However, the K-Touch smartphones will feature a better chipset made by NVIDIA for better performance while running high-end games.
The Alibaba Group, partially owned by Yahoo, is the operator of China’s biggest internet marketplace along with the largest consumer shopping website of the country, Taobao.com. Alibaba hasn’t yet fixed any sales targets for the new smartphones. Wang said that the responsibility for selling the phone does not lie with the company; it will only provide the system for them.
Alibaba has also planned to make an English version for the Aliyun OS which should be done before the end of this year; however it wasn’t announced when the phones and tablets running the English language version of the OS will go on sale. Wang also confirmed that Aliababa will not join the phone manufacturing business. The company has lately diversified its business much farther from its e-commerce core into the logistics, search mobile technology.
