China's Alibaba Group to Introduce First Mobile Phone Powered by Cloud OS

Alibaba, the cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group is about to come up with its own cloud operated system for mobile phones.

The K-Touch Cloud-Smart Phone W700 is the first mobile phone powered by the cloud OS, which will be introduced to the Chinese market at the end of July.

"Mobile users want a more open and convenient mobile OS, one that allows them to truly enjoy all that the Internet has to offer right in the palm of their hand, and the cloud OS, with its use of cloud-based applications, will provide that,” said Wang Jian, president of Alibaba Cloud Computing. "Introducing cloud apps to mobile devices not only brings a whole new user experience, but also greater ease for third-party mobile software developers who will be able to use Internet technology such as HTML5 and JavaScript to reduce the complexity in the app development process."

China is about to see a new competitor in Alibaba for Google Inc.’s Android OS, Apple’s iPhone and Microsoft’s Windows phone.

The firm has also called on developers to get busy making applications. It said, they could be developed on in-house servers or use AliCloud's infrastructure.

The company offers an initial 100 gigabytes of storage to every cloud user, with the intention to increase this in future.

According to latest statistics from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the number of 3G mobile users in China now exceeds 80 million, or 9.5 percent of all mobile users nationwide.