China has revealed its own government-backed mobile operating system dubbed China Operating System (COS) to rival the mobile OS from Google and Apple.
Developed jointly by China’s Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) and Shanghai Liantong Network Communications Technology, the COS is based on Linux and resembles Android to a great extent. The COS is said to support smartphones, tablets, desktop PCs as well as set-top boxes and comes with support for HTML5 apps. Unsurprisingly, the COS is not open source because of ‘safety concerns’.
HTC is said to be one of the major vendors backing the project, but hasn’t officially commented on the operating system yet.
Apart from the open source bits of Android and Linux, the OS has been built independently of the two and aims to address the short comings of foreign operating systems which haven’t managed to provide better localisation for input language, cloud services, application downloads and support, speech recognition and user interface among several other things.
According to reports in local media, the application portal of COS – similar to that of Apple App Store – already has over 100,000 apps.
[Source: Sina news]
[Image credit: CCTV News]
