Mobile Network Comparison

What do you mean you’ve never heard of Aliyun OS? If you haven’t yet, it might be the case that you will do some time soon. It’s an up-and-coming alternative mobile phone operating system that is already huge in China and aims to be as big as Android one-day. Here’s the low down on what is all about.

Aliyun OS was created by Alibaba, a Chinese-based Internet company worth over $4 billion. If you’re into tech, you may have heard of them but it it’s still not very well known outside of the Chinese market will stop spite that, it’s a true mega brand and it handles well over £100 billion on sales every year which is – if you can believe it – more than eBay and Amazon put together!

The company was first founded back in December 1998 and has grown more or less exponentially since then. As they are one of the biggest players in the online market in China, soon after the release of Google’s Android operating system, they started work on their own mobile phone OS.

Three years later, the first version was released in July 2011. Just like Android, the operating system is based upon the Linux kernel. While it does not use Dalvik, it’s effectively a clone of Android although it’s not natively compatible with Android applications. Despite this, Aliyun OS shares the same runtime, framework and developer tools as Android and even includes a way of running Android apps through a virtual machine.

Alibaba has designed the operating system to be fully integrated with the cloud. This means that all users get 100GB of free storage space with their accounts and that services such as e-mail, turn-by-turn navigation, texts, photos and whether all cloud-based. You can even stream applications from the web rather than having to store them on your phone’s memory.

Although relatively few manufacturers are releasing devices that run Aliyun OS, as the platform matures, more and more phones are able to use it. Already a year and a half ago, it was reported that over one million smartphones running Aliyun OS had been sold.

Interestingly, Alibaba have invested huge amounts of money and work into the operating system. Even the first release had already had a team of 1600 people working on it for three whole years, that adds up to about 10 million man hours of work in total which is pretty significant but any software project.

Just to put that in relative terms, it estimated that version 7.1 of the Red Hat distribution of Linux involved about 8,000 man years of development effort where is version 2.2 of Debian had taken almost 15,000 man years of developer time. Another slightly different benchmark is the huge $1.5 billion, 828-metre Burj Khalifa in Dubai which reportedly required at least 50 million man hours of labour. The matter what you compare it to, fair to say that Aliyun OS has got a lot behind it already.

However, despite all the effort that is behind Aliyun OS, there have been some setbacks. A particularly contentious issue was Acer’s launch of their first Aliyun smart phone back in September last year. Acer are a Taiwanese tech company well known in Europe for their laptops and PCs. Recently they’ve been branching out into tablets and phones.

They’ve been a member of the Open Handset Alliance – Google’s consortium of mobile firms – since mid-2009. On 13 September 2012, they were due to release their latest $470 CloudMobile A800 smart phone. All the press agencies have been contacted and the lavish launch ceremony was booked in for the new device in Shanghai. However, at the eleventh hour it was cancelled.

It later emerged that Acer had to pull the plug on the CloudMobile A800 due to pressure from Google. There have been told that their membership of the Open Handset Alliance was contingent upon them sticking only with Android. Google claimed that remain part of their club, they must be committed to working with only one version of Android and that the Aliyun OS was simply a rival fork of it.

Alibaba have vigorously contested this position, but at the end of the day Acer clearly valued their relationship with Google too much to risk their ire. A large part of the controversy relates to the perception that Google is pressure was simply designed to protect their own dominance in the smartphone market and prevent a viable alternative to Android emerging. If this were the case, then their commitment to openness would come second to the desire to model the competition.

It seems that the basis of their reasoning was that by concentrating on an endless number of rival forks of the Android operating system, fragmentation would be inevitable and would result in a far poorer user experience. It’s far from clear whether it’s the case that this would be a worthwhile sacrifice in exchange for true openness or whether Google is making a valid point. In any case, it seems that Acer was legally bound to remain committed only to Android.

Where does this leave Aliyun? According to recent reports, it’s certainly not helping its cause as its official app store seems to be complicit in providing pirated apps stolen from Android developers. Not only are Google’s own apps available (certainly not through official channels given their stance with Acer), but you can also download paid–for games for free at the Aliyun app store rather than pay for them on Android’s Play Store.

China is rather infamous for its lax approach to copyright law and intellectual property. After all there is also a very popular pirate site based in China called Nduoa. This also targets the Chinese market market with thousands of pirated Android apps. While Android has had copy protection built-in since Jelly Bean, not all devices are running the most recent versions yet and the encryption still able to be circumvented.

Either way, there’s no denying that the Chinese smart phone market is huge and will continue to grow at a particular rapid pace. They are already about 200 million Android users in China and it remains to be seen how big a chunk of this market Aliyun OS can capture.

The first two smart phone manufacturers to release phones running this operating system were K-Touch and Haier (both which are almost completely unknown in Europe and the US right now). However, we predict Zopo will soon be making huge inroads into the Western market, and they have already released a phone running Aliyun OS. The Zopo ZP980 which we reviewed quite recently has a sister version called the Zopo C2 which is identical apart from the fact it comes with Aliyun instead of Android. If Zopo and other Chinese manufacturers continue to become more popular over here, we can only expect to be hearing more and more about Aliyun OS in the future.

Would you consider buying a phone running Aliyun OS? What you think of Google’s and the Open handset Alliance’s position regarding Acer? And what you see in the future for both Android and Aliyun?

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Three Mobile has announced that it is finally starting its 4G rollout across the UK. The super high speed signal will initially be available only in London but Birmingham, Manchester and Reading will follow shortly.

The inappropriately-named network has said that the initial stages of the roll-out will be relatively slow with only a few thousand customers able to make use of 4G speeds to start with. Three is the last of the major networks to finalise its 4G plans and will be desperately trying to catch up to its rivals to get a usable 4G signal to the majority of the UK population.

A Three spokesperson said “We have begun to roll out 4G as promised but we are starting slowly as to ensure good customer service. This is a big change so we want to get it right. It’s all part of the evolution of the network.”

It’s now a year after EE first started providing its 4G service and Three has only just begun to turn on its antennae. But, in an attempt to make up for the delay, Three has the most promising deal available from any of the networks. Unlike their competitors EE, Vodafone and O₂, customers will not have to pay any extra to benefit from the higher data speeds. Nor will they have to sign up to get locked into new lengthy contracts. And for this, we can only applaud them.

In addition to London, Birmingham, Manchester and Reading, Three has announced that their 4G rollout will pick up the pace in January next year. They have also previously revealed the other regions that will be next to get 4G during 2014. They are Aberdeen, Blackpool, Bolton, Bournemouth, Bradford, Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge,Cardiff, Coventry, Derby, Dundee, Edinburgh, Exeter, Glasgow, Gloucester,Huddersfield, Ipswich, Kingston Upon Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Luton, Milton Keynes, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Northampton, Norwich, Nottingham, Oxford,Peterborough, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Preston, Sheffield, Slough, Southampton,Southend On Sea, Stoke On Trent, Stockport, Swindon, Watford and York.

We’re also happy to see that Three have cemented their reputation as the most forward-thinking and internet-friendly network. Unlike all their competitors, they will be the only UK network offering truly unlimited data on their 4G plans. This means having super fast internet on your phone is transformed from being nice-to-have to truly-useful.

Even better, Three has also announced another useful benefit to their customers – completely free roaming in the US. While other networks are happy to cash-in on their customers’ trips and holidays, Three are making the most of their global connections to make life simpler for people rather than try to put their customers through the mangle to squeeze every penny out of them.

Are you a Three customer? Are you looking forward to getting 4G access? Or do you current use 4G on another network? What do you think of Three’s choice to offer it at no extra charge and make unlimited data deals available? Let us know!

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On Monday, Giffgaff paid out a total of £2.4 million to all their members as a payback bonus. Over the last few years, that makes the total earned over £8 million and the amount only seems to be increasing year-on-year. It’s all part of their founding philosophy of mutual giving that is reflected in their very name and rewards everyone who helps the network grow by posting in the forums and recommending their plans to friends.

If you want to join Giffgaff to get involved in the payback scheme and earn your share of the next multi-million pound payout, simply join through the link above. This way you’ll start off with £5 free credit at no extra cost to yourself.

Giffgaff aims to involve their customers as much as possible in running aspects of the network such as customer service and help as well as generating new leads. Because this is done in a social crowdsourced way, they can save huge amounts of money compared to traditional marketing techniques and thus offer far better prices than the competition. There’s even a hefty chunk left over to return to everyone who plays a role in the running of the virtual network.

Payback is processed every six months in June and December and, as Giffgaff has grown as a network, the amount of people helping out has grown massively as has the amount of money paid back to the community. We’ve been carefully charting Giffgaff’s payback since the first payments went out back in June 2010.

Members can choose to either receive their payback earnings as airtime credit to spend on calls, texts, internet or bundles goodybags. Alternatively they can donate it to a charity of the community’s choice or get it as cold hard cash. Some people do very well from this – over the last six months, one member even somehow earned a massive total of £17,000!

We’re especially happy to see that Giffgaff include charity as part of their mutual giving philosophy. Last payback the network’s members donated a massive £12,150 and Giffgaff doubled that making the total £24,300. We’re sure you agree that it’s fantastic that charities can be benefiting from these amounts of money.

This June Giffgaff paid out almost £2 million and the time before that their total was £1.85 million. So the trend is steadily increasing and seems to be pretty sustainable. We wouldn’t be surprised if the next payback period got close to a total of £3 million paid out.

The charities chosen this time round are the very worthy Disasters Emergency Committee and The Alzheimer’s Society. The userbase excelled themselves this time round and, once the donations were matched by the generous people at Giffgaff, the total given to charity was an amazing £58,000.

We put together the graph at the top of the page to chart the history of Giffgaff’s payback payments so far. What do you think will happen to the trend in the future? Are you involved in Giffgaff’s payback scheme? And how much do you predict they will give away new June?

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