Llaisdy

There’s been various gossip around the web this past week about Baidu’s forthcoming mobile operating system, 易 (yì, easy).

• Reuters wrote that Baidu Yi is “modelled” on Android.
• 山寨机 (Shānzhài Jī, cottage machine or kind of home made) wrote about its compatibility with Android.
• The English-language rumour mill says Yi is built on / based on / a fork of Android.

Without a decent grasp of Chinese, it’s quite difficult to get beyond the chatter. 搜狐IT (Sōuhú IT) has a couple of articles from the 6th September:

• 百度易手机11月上市 戴尔负责硬件制造 (Baidu Yi mobile phone, devices from Dell, coming in November): quotes Baidu CEO on the importance of compatibility with Android (百度CEO李彦宏在接受搜狐IT采访时 … 百度•易“刚开始做，需要兼容现有流行的操作系统——Android系统”。).
• 外媒解读百度易：剥离安卓应用 封装自己的服务 (Foreign media interpretation of Baidu Yi: Android with Baidu applications): has a passage mentioning Yi as a fork of Android, but the paragraph does start with “allegedly” (据称，实际上在中国销售的部分安卓手机上，百度的网络服务开始取代谷歌的服务，不过百度此次将更加深入，将在安卓操作系统基础之上推出一个独立的分支。).