Shanda, With a View to a Phone of its Own, Launches an Android ROM

The new Lezhong ROM, based on Android, by Shanda.

Shanda (NASDAQ:SNDA), a leading web and gaming company in China, has released the open beta of its new Android ROM, dubbed Lezhong. It’s the first step towards launching its own budget Android smartphone later this year, on which we reported recently.

The Shanda Lezhong OS is based on the open-source parts of Android, and incorporates all of Shanda’s standalone apps. These include Yuncheng, its cloud-based e-book platform, and the Evernote-style note-syncing app Mknote.

This effort is an attempt by Shanda to make use of Android to push more into mobile. It’s also a challenge to China’s other web giants who already have a mobile platform of their own – and ones which are also very oriented around cloud computing – such as Baidu’s Yi, and Alibaba’s Aliyun phone.

As QQ Tech News points out, Shanda’s upcoming OS looks a lot like MIUI, the ROM that eventually got a life of its own in the popular Xiaomi phone. Unintentionally proving that there’s some copying going on, the Lezhong ROM will be auto-updated over-the-air every Friday, just as the MIUI team does with its own software.

Other than the built-in Shanda apps (which exist already), I don’t see anything new, surprising, or enticing about the Lezhong version of Android. Seems that ordinary folks might as well just buy any existing Android phone and then, if they so wish, install a bunch of Shanda apps on it.

The Lezhong ROM is available only in Chinese, so if you’re an expert tweaker and tinkerer, go here to download it.