While Chinese copycats usually make more headlines, its important to remember that there are some amazing talents in China creating equally amazing work. A 19-year-old teenager, who goes by the name of Peakji, has already developed lots of excellent software, most notably Mammoth 4, an impressive mobile browser which won the top award at Macworld Asia.

As it was made by a senior school student, Mammoth 4 has a very distinctive design and user’s experience. The interface of Mammoth 4 is so concise that you can only see a slide bar in the bottom. Most operations can be done by one finger sliding: switching tabs by sliding the bottom bar, reloading or dismissing tabs, visiting your favorite pages by sliding your finger up.

Mammoth has lots of interesting functions like private browsing mode, an ad-blocking feature, Twitter and so on. We talked to the prodigous young developer to find out more about him and his new browser.

How long did you take to develop the Mammoth browser?

The 4th series of the Mammoth browser was released yesterday. The series began last August. During the period, it kept updating rapidly. In order to guarantee the quality, every major version number is rewritten completely.

The functions of the first version is quite simple, just testing whether users accept the operation mode or not. So it took only a month to launch. The second major version (2.0.0) began to integrate a multi-tab system and launched by the end of 2010. The third major version formed a more complete style. But at that time, I was in my last year of high school. It released in March and it had a lot of flaws. After the collage entrance exam, I devote myself to the development of Mammoth 4. All the codes, designs, and images were reset. This took three months.

Why did you develop Mammoth 4?

The reason is quite simple. Just because I felt multi-tabbed browsing at the time was limited. There was a lot of room for improvement in user experience. So I treated myself as a user, and developed a browser from the angle of a user’s demand. That is the reason why Mammoth is so welcomed widely by users.

From the market, there are three kinds of browsers: Native, third-party paid, and third party free. The native only has basic functions, not enough to serve enthusiasts. The third-party paid browsers are usually developed by small companies, lacking user experience. All depend on advertising, deeply damaging user experience and lacking in personality. So there is lots of room in the market for Mammoth.

What is the most outstanding function of Mammoth 4, in your opinion?

Mammoth 4 expressed my objective completely: convenient + smart + deep.

Convenient: At first many users are overwhelmed by the interface of Mammoth 4. But after a little adjusting, they will find the gestures are convenient. Traditional gestures request users to remember many actions, for example, draw a X or O to trigger corresponding actions. That’s not only hard to remember, but also hard to use. However, the gestures design of Mammoth is based on “leading,” that is to say, as a finger flipping, users can see the results, without having to learn learning complex gestures.

Smart: the managing of tabs is bothersome. So mammoth can analyze a user’s preference to assist the actions of new, cover, turn off the page and other operations. Furthermore, Mammoth can acquire the area of a user’s fingertip to assist in identification.

Deep: The layout of the main interface is extremely simple, almost completely transparent. But when users switch on the menu, they will feel the functions of Mammoth 4 seeing many options, functions, and the code editor. I think most people will like this feeling of surprise.

What are the shortcomings of Mammoth 4, in your opinion?

There are lots of shortcomings on Mammoth 4, especially the limitation of the core. Apple only allows the webkit core browser to launch on the app store. So I tried my best to optimize on the DOM layer. Efficiency in javascript and HTML5 support are still not perfect. Besides the technology, I obsessed over how to let light users enjoy the Mammoth browser. Sometimes too many functions will confuse or even bore the less demanding users. I do not want to give up on any potential user, so the structure of Mammoth will be further optimized.

To get an idea of how the Mammoth 4 browser works, check out the video demo below.

Alphatown is a social network and virtual community created in real-time by its users. It was developed by Douban – now China’s fifth largest SNS – and launched on September 1. It’s now in public beta, and represents an innovative attempt to go both beyond conventional social networks, and to monetize Douban with its own virtual currency.

When you login to Alphatown, the interface works like an online map, just like Google’s or Baidu’s. But Alphatown is not a real place. You can use the W-A-S-D or arrow keys to move through the city, exploring its shops and streets. You can rent a room, set-up or visit shops, take the subway, or just simply stroll along the street. It’s kinda like what we do in reality. But note that this isn’t Second Life, with amazing graphics and first-person viewpoints.

The aim of Alphatown, then, is not to replicate your life on the web. Essentially, it is a new kind of SNS, unlike Facebook, Renren, or Twitter – though it has parallels with some of the social games that users of Facebook, Renren, and Sina Weibo like to use. Let me be your guide to this curious city:

Every street (pictured top) works like a public chatroom. Conversations are viewed in the form of chat bubbles that appear, just like you “heard” it on the street. It may be hard to strike up a conversation with somebody in reality, but in Alphatown the experience is less awkward as you can see their thoughts and messages, and connect with users you are interested in (pictured above).

Shops (pictured above) in Alphatown don’t sell anything at this early stage, but in future shop-owners will be able to sell virtual items. Shopkeepers can put pictures and articles in the shop. It works a bit like a blog, but things become interesting when these shops are neatly lined up along the street. For example, there is a street called Diagon Alley where there are Harry Potter themed shops with names like Three Broomsticks, Flourish and Blotts, and the Leaky Cauldron. You can set up a shop by paying about 25 douyou, the Douban-created virtual currency in Alphatown.

Dormitories are on the opposite side of the street to the shops. You can rent an empty apartment in a street of your choice. Right now it’s free to do so until the virtual currency becomes properly exchangable. Apartments are like microblogs where you can tweet.

Yang Bo, founder of Douban, told DoNews recently that:

Alphatown is a very diverse, vibrant city, and there exists much possibility for developing business models in the future. The future direction of Alphatown, whether it’s a game or a virtual community, depends on the users.

Try out Alphatown here, though it requires a Douban login.

Kandian is a new social TV service from Sina, launched over the weekend. Essentially, it’s a multimedia viewing and sharing service linked closely to Sina’s own Weibo platform. Users can upload or live-stream – in a manner similar to the Americam site, Justin.tv – and then share and discuss the content with friends. In addition to user-generated content, there are some proper TV channels on the site that can be streamed for free. The site is still in private beta.

The UI design of Kandian.com is simple and clean. The navigation bar contains three tabs: Channels, Surrounding, and Live…

Channels (pictured above) is your personal channel, where users can set their favourite programs by subscribing to channels. What’s more, Kandian allows you to create your own albums which can be shared with friends.

Surrounding (pictured above) is a good choice when you can’t find interesting programs in the Channels section. This tab is sort of like your timeline/stream, which documents things like what friends watched, read or listened to. You can dip in to watch whatever you want from all that, or make a personal program list.

The Live page (pictured above) contains Sina’s live channel, and satellite TV channels from around China. The coolest part of Kandian is that users can make a new program by splicing and editing the programs you have watched already.

This is an impressive new product from Sina, which expands its Weibo platform even wider. In recent months, the company has added social gaming and a virtual currency and many other features. They come together to make Sina Weibo a fully-fledged social network, and not just a Twitter-like site.

[Image source: TechWeb]

The BYD badged smartphone, as shown off on weibo.com/bydhetao. Click to enlarge.

He Tao, a senior exec at Chinese battery- and auto-maker, BYD, posted news and a photo to his Weibo account yesterday, saying the company will soon release a self-developed Android smartphone.

The rather cryptic tweet was full of numbers, leaving his Weibo followers to guess what they pertained to. The full tweet said:

BYD is going to release a mobile phone bigger than 4, thinner than 11, bigger than 1500, higher than 2.3, and most important of all, smaller than 1000.

The specific meaning of all that is: the screen is bigger than 4 inches, the smartphone’s thickness is less than 11 millimetres, the battery capacity is greater than 1500mAh, it runs something newer than Android 2.3, and the price is less than 1000 RMB (US$157).

The image attached to the tweet (see above) shows a good-looking smartphone branded with “BYD ODM,” which is a reference to BYD’s ODM (original design manufacturer) division. It is not clear if BYD will simply be the ODM or launch its own brand of smartphone.

BYD is most famous for Warren Buffet’s investment in it, and is also a rapidly expanding ODM, supplying Nokia, Motorola, Huawei and many others. So it’s no surprise that they can make a handset – but it would be astonishing if they decide to sell it under the BYD brand-name.

With the greater maturity of manufacturing in China – and the relative openness of Android as an operation system – it is no longer hard for Chinese companies to produce their own brand of smartphones. During the past few months, we have seen many Android-based phones, such as the Xiaomi M1, the Baidu Yi platform, and the Meizu MX.

Most successful international apps have a group of Chinese imitators. The success of magazine-style news-reading app Flipboard has brought with it many such Chinese “brothers,” such as Fruit, Netease reader, and perhaps the most popular of them all, Zaker. To commemorate its growing acclaim this year, it’s time to give it a mini-review.

Zaker is made by Dooland, a web company founded in 2007, and has separate versions for iPhone and iPad. Like Flipboard – which got blocked in China back in May of this year – it carefully grabs news and interesting articles from numerous sources – from microblogs such as Weibo, blogs, news sites, and magazines, and updates in real time. Users can add their own sources via RSS and Google Reader.

Zaker app for iPad.

As a reading app, Zaker has done much to improve the reading experience. Pages are turned with the same motion you would use to turn pages in a real magazine. Also, Zaker makes use of social networks such as Sina Weibo to allow you to share what you’re perusing.

When you login to Zaker, it’s a bit like a Twitter or Weibo app, with vertical scrolling to browse content. You can click on any link and read the news or watch the videos directly in the app. Clicking on the screen in the upper right corner lets you send a new tweet (to Weibo, I mean). You can favourite, retweet, and comment on any tweets you like inside Zaker, making it into a sort of satellite social network. Also, when you write and send your tweet, you can directly use the camera to take pictures.

Zaker app gives first-time users a neat demo.

Chen Chi-he, the CEO of Dooland, believes its advantage lies in the content. About 300 newspapers, 800 general news websites, and many magazines have cooperated with them in agreeing to aggregate content. Talking to Chinese tech site Hexun, he said:

Copyright risk is what we questioned about Flipboard’s model, so we have to consider that fully by establishing a good relationship with the content side [...] We will try to combine with e-commerce, LBS, and games. But at this stage, what we should do first is build a user base.

In China, on a subway or bus, you often see people reading while commuting. The market for such readers will surely only get bigger here, especially as Apple and its iOS gadgets grow in popularity in China. Perhaps Zaker will lead the reading revolution here.

Here’s a video of the app in action on an iPhone: