Baidu, The Chinese Google, Plans Own Mobile OS

The feud between China and Google just doesn't end. Not only is China now allegedly blocking Gmail, the country's leading search engine, Baidu, is planning its own mobile OS. According to Baidu CEO Robin Li, the company plans to develop a lightweight operating system for smartphones and tablets that will have advantages to eventually lure away users from competing services, such as Google.

However, Baidu's direction for their OS is quite different from Android. Li envisions a lightweight mobile OS that takes just a second to boot up and features only a searchbox on the home screen. That search box would be used to navigate to everything else. Li says that the development of the new system could take three to five years as they want to first create a "wide range of other uses" for its search box before it moves on to tackling a mobile OS.

Baidu currently dominates 70 percent of the China internet search market, with a 26 percent share of the mobile search market. It's offering may seem too simplistic and slow to launch to possibly compete with Android, but could still thrive in the large Chinese market, where a lower per capita income has a different set of demands for mobile computing.

[via Business Insider]