The WoPhone OS is a Chinese-government backed operating system for smartphones and tablet devices that is said to be ready to go head-to-head with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android OS.
According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, China Unicom is developing the Linux-based WoPhone OS and will be ready to ship in a matter of months. To make things even more legitimate, the article goes on to say that “Chinese government agencies including the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology supported development of the Unicom operating system.”
Living in Asia, I see plenty of junk smartphones coming out of China. Overwhelmingly, these cheap handsets operate on the Symbian operating system. But I’ve been overjoyed in the last few months seeing some phones actually running Google’s Android. In fact, if Android were to catch-on in Asia, that would be a huge win for Google and a massive blow to Apple and their competing iOS. Not only that, but you could have a useful smartphone at a very low price point.
After all, why wouldn’t Chinese smartphone manufacturers use Android? It’s open, stable, customizable, robust and most importantly, very cheap! Unfortunately, the Chinese seem to be control freaks and want their own OS developed. Seeing the current hacked-up Symbian phones the Chinese have been cranking out for years, I’m not exactly confident that China Telecom can design a decent mobile OS…at least not for a long trial-and-error period.
So there are two losers and one winner with this news. Asian low-cost smartphone consumers lose because they’ll have to suffer through using a sub-par smartphone OS instead of Google’s Android. Google clearly loses because they will be cut out of the critical Asian market share.
And the big winner here is Apple. This is because the more players in the smartphone market there are, the less likely Google’s Android will dominate the market and potentially suffocate Apple’s market share.
