Hands On Aliyun Cloud OS Phone, K-Touch W700

We wrote about Aliyun, Alibaba’s cloud computing service, and we said Aliyun Cloud OS phone is the most aggressive part in Alibaba’s cloud computing strategy. With Aliyun’s first phone (W700 by K-Touch) in hands, we are now able to tell our readers more about Alibaba’s vision on the cloud service.

Android-based or Linux-based Cloud OS

There is still a debate whether Aliyun Cloud OS is Android based or not. I asked the guy who was the lead of the OS team. He confirmed the system’s built on Linux, not on Android. The reason it can run Android applications is that they developed a transcoder so all Android applications are actually got transcoded first before installation in order to run Aliyun Cloud OS.

Why Cloud OS for phone

Dr. WANG Jian explains,

You may feel OK if you lost the phone, but you definitely don’t want to lost the data on the phone; You may not want to share your phone with your friends, but you may be more willing to share some of the data with them even strangers.

So a Cloud OS for phone could be the ultimate solution.

Native App will be dead

I am reading a post on VentureBeat, The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history. HTML5 will be the key driving force for the mobile service market, and Alibaba, this eCommerce-focus Kingdom has seen the trend and been planning for this for years. The W700 phone has integrated cloud strorage and sync service (the data such as photos, messages, call history, note etc can be synced with Aliyun cloud system, and accessible on my.aliyun.com), cloud local (Koubei is the Yelp-like service which got acquired by Alibaba) service, price comparison service, group buying service (Taobao’s Juhuasuan) and more important the Cloud Application store (currently hosts several hundreds applications). You can see the screenshots below to get better ideas.

We heard that W700 did not have a good sale number. I don’t want to comment on the hardware part, but for the insight on the Cloud OS, I think what Aliyun’s doing now is really respectable.