Acer Launches Aliyun OS Phone as China’s E-Commerce Giant Challenges Android [HANDS-ON]

Today, the mobile OS created by Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce company, is getting its first big-name hardware in the sleek shape of the brand-new Acer CloudMobile A800. This is the third smartphone to carry the cloud-oriented Aliyun OS – coming after two less convincing efforts with some minor phone brands (from Haier and K-Touch). In May of this year, the one million sales milestone was reached for the platform as a whole – but that’s a tiny slice of the tasty smartphone pie.

[UPDATE: The launch was cancelled/postponed at the last possible minute; it’s quite odd, and we’re trying to find out why exactly. Nonetheless, enjoy our review!]. The new flagship phone is launched this afternoon at an event that’s starting right now in Shanghai with Acer GM Dave Chan and the Aliyun department president Wang Jian in attendance. We actually got a chance to have a lengthy hands-on with the new Acer CloudMobile A800 over the past weekend at the company’s annual AliFest event. In terms of hardware, the Acer (TPE:2353) phone has a 1.5GHz Snapdragon (MSM8260A) dual-core processor and a crisp, 4.3-inch hi-res screen that barely shows any distinguishable individual pixels. The phone’s back looks classy with a dimpled rear cover that looks and feels like that of the Nexus 7 tablet made by Taiwanese rival Asus. It’ll cost 2,999 RMB ($470), putting it slightly below recent Android flagships like the wildly popular Samsung Galaxy SIII.

Going hands-on with new Acer CloudMobile A800 and the Aliyun 2.0 sofware – which is not based on Android, but can run Android apps and games – the emphasis is still on web apps, on which the phone is focused more than anything else.

A phone for online retailers

Click to enlarge

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the mobile software has a strong slant towards online shopping and retailing – but not quite in the same way as Amazon’s Android-based tablet efforts, which are more about consuming mobile content. One of the core new features of the updated OS (“Aliyun OS 2012 Autumn edition,” says the phone’s settings) on the Acer phone is a specialist web app for merchants on Alibaba’s two biggest consumer e-commerce sites, Taobao and Tmall (pictured below). The e-tailer merchant web app gives lots of data – in line with the company’s recent push into real-time data on shopping habits – about where the visitors to your online store is coming from, the number of page-views, and some visual analytics as well. Another web app syndicates industry news relevant to online store owners on the Alibaba platforms.

Sure, that’s not whizz-bang awesome stuff for the average phone buyer, so the Aliyun OS as a whole still faces a huge challenge to lure folks away from the myriad charms of Android (the dominant smartphone OS) or iOS. But at least the hardware is now at a level that it stands a better chance of luring punters away from good-looking Apple, HTC, Samsung, and Huawei phones.

Cloud apps versus Android apps

Even my lousy camera shows that the HD screen looks crisp and lovely (Click to enlarge all images).