Chinese company Baidu is often referred to as the Google of China. The company operates the largest search engine in China… and now Baidu is getting ready to take another Google-like step. Baidu is preparing to launch a smartphne operating system called Baidu Yi.

Right now the Baidu Yi experience is actually built on top of Google Android software, but future versions could be built from the ground up.

As you’d expect from a smartphone experience designed by a search company, the Baidu Yi phones show a search box prominently. In fact, the search box appears and allows users to search the web even before all the other portions of the operating system have fully loaded.

Baidu Yi also offers users up to 180GB of online storage space for email, photos, contacts, and other data, allowing the OS to run on mobile devices that may not have much local storage.

Baidu isn’t the first Chinese company to announce a mobile operating system with a cloud-based focus. Internet commerce site Alibaba recently introduced Aliyun OS, an operating system designed to run mobile web apps rather than native apps. Like Baidu Yi, Aliyun OS is based on Google Android, but it’s been modified to offer a very different user experience.

via Penn-Olson

The folks behind e-commerce site Alibaba have announced plans to launch an operating system called Aliyun OS designed for mobile devices including phones and tablets. The new OS will hit China by the end of the month. One of the first devices to run the operating system will be the K-Touch smartphone from device maker Tianyu.

Aliyun OS is based on Android, but it’s designed to run web apps using HTML5, JavaScript and other web-based technologies rather than native apps. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s very similar to the approach Apple took when first launching the iPhone. But it wasn’t long before it became clear that the iPhone was a big paperweight if you didn’t have an active internet connection and Apple launched software developer tools to enable third party apps. The App Store was born, and the rest is history.

Alibaba isn’t the only company banking on web apps though. Mozilla, the makers of the popular Firefox web browser, recently announced a project called Boot To Gecko which is also designed first and foremost to run web apps.

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Remember when Apple introduced the iPhone and insisted there was no need to let developers write third party apps in native code because they could just write web apps? Yeah, that didn’t work out so well and it didn’t take long for Apple to offer a software developer kit, launch an App Store, and change the face of mobile computing.

But that was a few years ago, and HTML5 and other web technologies have come a long way in blurring the lines between what you can do with a native app and what you can do with a web app. In fact, web pages can now access you’re phone’s hardware to do things like track your location, automatically rotate when you move the screen, or record audio or video. So maybe it’s time to take another look at the web app-only idea. At least that’s the approach Mozilla seems to be taking.

The folks behind the popular Firefox web browser have announced a new project called Boot to Gecko, or B2G. The idea is to build an operating system designed to run web apps and only web apps. It will be based on the same operating system kernel as Android, but B2G won’t run Android apps. Instead Mozilla hopes to built tools that allow third party developers to access the phone’s telephone, camera, USB, Bluetooth and other hardware from web apps.

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HP contends that one of the strengths of the webOS platform is that the company controls both the hardware and the software, allowing HP to tightly control the user experience of the TouchPad tablet and webOS phones, much the way Apple does with its iOS devices. But that doesn’t mean HP isn’t willing to license the operating system to other companies that want to use it.

Earlier this month the company’s CEO confirmed that HP might be open to licensing the OS, and today Bloomberg reports that HP is already “talking to a number of companies.” One of those companies may be Samsung, which has launched a number of smartphones and tablets running Google Android in recent years.

This Is My Next reports that HP isn’t necessarily going to license the software to every company that asks. Instead, HP is apparently looking for phone makers that are looking to prioritize webOS over other platforms, possibly even helping to develop the software further.

On the one hand, if Samsung, HTC, or another device maker launches a webOS handset, it would mean that HP wouldn’t have quite as much control over the user experience. On the other hand, the more phones that are running the software, the more attractive the platform may become for users and for third party developers.

Say you love your iPhone or iPod touch, but you’ve always kind of wondered what it would be like to use Android instead. You could go all out and actually install Android on a jailbroken iPhone. Or you could take the easier route and simply install iAndroid, a free Android simulator available from the Cydia store.

While iAndroid won’t give you the full Android experience, it does offer a rough approximation of the Android experience. When you load iAndroid you’ll see a nice big HTC Sense-style widget with the time (although there’s no weather data). There are also icons for Settings, Phone, Twitter, Facebook, Camera, and Browser.

The phone and camera functions actually work, allowing you to make calls or take photos – although you won’t necessarily get all the bells and whistles you would with the default iOS apps. The web browser works reasonably well, but there aren’t any advanced features such as support for browser tabs or Adobe Flash (obviously).

The Twitter and Facebook apps are actually just links to the mobile web sites, but they work pretty well. Because there are no hardware buttons, an on-screen “home” button appears in most apps, allowing you to go back to the virtual home screen. There are no buttons for search or menu though.

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HP may have acquired Palm just to get its hands on the webOS operating system (does a company have hands?), but HP CEO Leo Apotheker says the company isn’t ruling out the possibility of sharing webOS with other device makers. When asked whether HP would license webOS for use on phones or other devices from competing companies, Apotheker basically said, sure, why not?

Specifically, he says HP will make webOS available to enterprise customers and small businesses. But when asked if HP would even allow a big name phone-maker such as HTC to license webOS, the CEO said the company would be willing to “entertain” the idea.

This is all a far cry from saying that we will see webOS devices from competitors. But it sounds like HP is at least contemplating becoming a software company as well as a hardware company.

via PreCentral and All Things D

As expected, the next major release of the BlackBerry operating system will be called BlackBerry 7. RIM unveiled the new OS this morning, announcing that the first two phones to run the new software will be the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and BlackBerry Bold 9930.

The operating system is described as offering a faster user experience, improved browsing, and more. Here are some of the highlights:

• Expanded voice-activated search
• Manage personal and corporate content separately with BlackBerry Balance
• Liquid Graphics with faster rendering, zooming, and panning
• New JavaScript JIT (just in time) compiler
• Enhanced HTML5 support including HTML5 video

The Bold 9900 and 9930 phones will also ship with the full version of Docs To Go for managing Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files. It’s not entirely clear if this means all BlackBerry 7 phones will get Docs To Go, since the press release only mentions the Bold 9900 and 9930.

The new phones will feature 1.2 GHz processors, 768MB of RAM, 8GB of storage, 5MP cameras, and slim designs with cases that are just 10.5mm thick. The phones will have 2.8 inch, 640 x 480 capacitive multitouch touchscreen displays along with QWERTY keyboards. They’re due out this summer.

Unfortunately it looks like Blackberry 7 will only be available on new handsets. Existing phones don’t have the hardware to support the operating system, which means RIM won’t be offering software updates.

Google has made a habit of releasing the source code for each version of its Android operating system within days or weeks of the day when the first products start shipping with the OS. But while the Motorola XOOM tablet with Google Android 3.0 Honeycomb has been available for weeks, the Honeycomb source code has been missing in action. And according to Business Week, we should probably get used to that.

Business Week reports that Google will delay the distribution of the source code because the company’s not ready to let third party developers alter the source. Apparently some companies haven’t gotten the memo — Samsung has already announced plans to offer two tablets with a customized version of Android 3.0 called TouchWiz 4.0.

The good news is that the reason Google wants to hold the source code tight for now is because the company knows that Honeycomb isn’t well designed for smartphones, and Andy Rubin tells Business Week that the goal is to prevent carriers from putting the tablet OS on phones “creating a really bad user experience.”

The bad news is that Google has been a long-time champion of the open source ethos, and this move is going to make it harder for phone makers, wireless carriers, and independent developers to dig into the code to find ways to make the OS better, make it fit their needs, or do new or unusual things with the app or with third party apps that tightly integrate with the operating syste,.