OPhone loses to Android, and iPhone
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The sales of phones with a China-developed system - the OPhone -only accounted for 1 percent of the domestic smartphone market, a Beijing-based information technology consulting firm said yesterday.
A lack of an innovative interface and being not open to allow handset makers to add their own features were blamed as holding back the sales of the home-grown OPhone system, according to CCID Consulting.
China Mobile, the world's No. 1 carrier by subscribers and the main developer of the OPhone, said it would launch the latest OPhone 3.0 this year, with improved interface design and open functions.
By the end of September, only 333,300 OPhones were sold in the domestic market, accounting for just 1.5 percent of the Chinese smartphone market. Domestic smartphone sales, meanwhile, totaled 222.03 million units with revenue of 49.56 billion yuan (US$7.4 billion), CCID said in a report.
The OPhone sales were way below China Mobile's expectations of 1 million units.
"It wasn't competitive against other mobile systems, such as iPhone's iOS and Google's Android," CCID said.
The OPhone, mainly developed by China Mobile, is not open enough to let handset vendors include their own features. For example, Motorola added Blur features and HTC added HTC Sense on their phones running Google's Android, experts said.
So far over 20 handset vendors including Acer, Lenovo, Motorola, Samsung and LG have launched OPhones.
