As reported by Taiwan based website Digitimes, China based e-commerce giant Alibaba Group has teamed with five Chinese handset makers to launch six smartphones running on its home-grown AMOS (Alibaba Mobile OS). It remains to be seen whether other big and reputed China-based smartphones vendors, including Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo will also support AMOS.
Alibaba has tied up with five Chinese mobile handsets makers – Konka, Amoi, G’Five, Zopo and Xiaolajiao, which are basically second or third-tier brands in China and none of them are making smartphones which run on Android OS of Google. Alibaba has decided to reenter the smartphone market after Google reportedly blocked the China-based e-commerce company’s plans to launch a smartphone that will run on its previous Aliyun OS in September 2012 in cooperation with Acer, a partner of Google.
To encourage local five handsets makers and to promote sales of AMOS phones, Alibaba will reimburse them an ongoing fee of CNY1 (US$0.16) a month for every AMOS phone in use after purchase, and Alibaba has also set up a CNY1 billion program to encourage software developers to develop applications for AMOS.
Smartphone chipset solution vendors, including MediaTek, Spreadtrum Communications and Qualcomm reportedly will support AMOS, the sources of Digitimes have revealed. Alibaba also aims to expand the number of its smartphone hardware partners to as many as 30 by year-end 2013, added the sources.
How the smartphones running AMOS perform and how they are received by the Chinese users will determine future course of action by Alibaba and if they are successful with this experiment then they would certainly spread their wings in other countries also.
