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Google's China Rival To Create Android-Like OS
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."
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So, what they're really saying is they'll be releasing an Android copy.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
You surely mean counterfeit, right?
It'll probably have radium and cyanide and melamine in it too..
I for one welcome our Chinese Android Overlords.
I bet China's Android consumers get 2.1 before AT&T refugees like myself do
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.
Trolling is a art,
Loaded up the comments for this news report to see if anyone knew anything about the phone and was confronted with a page of comments of downright racism. I feel quite ashamed all of a sudden.
Why wouldn't they be allowed to take the Android source code and make their own OS out of it?
As a matter of fact they can collaborate with Google on this... If I'm not mistaken it's called a "Community" which consists of "Collaborators".
And you would trust China to Collaborate? I don't think I would. I could however, see Chinese engineers take the existing, available AndroidOS source, ad in some goodies, and notpublish the source changes.
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.
"This algorithm runs in constant time. Come on, 2,147,483,648 is a constant..."
There is vanishingly little innovation in Chinese industry. A good portion is just manufacturing companies, that build what other companies request. You come in with designs, specs, and parts, they turn those in to the finished product. A good portion of the remainder is devoted to ripping off products that others make. They copy what parts of the design the can and produce clones. Sometimes said clones are just cheap knockoffs not sold as the real things, other times they try and pass off the whole thing as real. Happens with Cisco products all the time.
There just aren't many companies developing new products. They aren't in the market of creativity, just mass production.
Thus, pretty reasonable to guess that what will happen here is that they'll grab Andriod, being open source and all that, replace logos and the search engine, set it to Chinese and call it good. A rip off, not even a derivative.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but android provides a lot of integration into ALL of Google's most popular web-services, not just search, so it could be that Baidu sees success of Android as being detrimental to Baidu offering competing web-services to things like g-mail, certainly it offers a bunch of apps to do this (I don't know to what extent there's anything actually in the OS that does this) Also they might want to offer a competing "app" marketplace. What probably makes the most sense, would be for Baidu just to take the Android source code, replace the stuff that integrates w/ google web-apps w/ stuff that integrates w/ Baidu web-services, and then publish it w/ their own Marketplace app. I doubt it will be particularly successful, certainly it has no chance at all EXCEPT in China, but who knows...
It's Bring search, you plick!
Sigs are for losers
While China-bashing is really popular these days, I wouldn't be so quick to say "they'll just copy Android". There are a LOT of phones in China that run Linux. Most of the Linux distributions used are homegrown by the manufacturer and have little consistency between them. I wouldn't be surprised if Baidu just bought one of the dev teams from a phone manufacturer and had them slap "Baidu" all over everything.
It would be a Good Thing if they could get it used phones from multiple manufacturers - there might be some hope of writing an app that would run on more than one brand of phone!
And you're ignorant of the situation to still think that the USA still makes tons of shit, when most of it is in fact, manufactured in Mexico, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, etc, shipped to China for final assembly, and then brought back to the USA.
If your version of things was true, Ohio, PA, and basically any and every other state/commonwealth that relied on manufacturing wouldn't be struggling so much because 90% or more of their manufacturing base is gone.
Have you actually BEEN to Detroit, Lansing, or ANY of the other manufacturing cities in Michigan lately?
What the fuck is wrong with your brain?
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.