Acer's CloudMobile (A800) has quietly slipped on its September 5th release date in the UK and headed East, where it's swapped its Android front-end for Alibaba's Aliyun OS. The dual-core handset will be released in China this Friday for ¥2,999 (approximately $474), making it the most expensive in the country -- according to the Wall Street Journal. Acer has reportedly chosen the fledgling, cloud-based OS for its Chinese customers because of the easy user experience, especially for smartphone first-timers. The company seems committed to exploring Aliyun in follow-up devices also, with one planned for release next month and more coming in 2013. Meanwhile, the flagship has yet to receive a dollar price or release date at Expansys, which doesn't suggest imminent availability of the Ice Cream Sandwich variant. Unfortunately, we'll probably never see Aliyun make it outside of China and into our eager hands... not without dropping some serious cash on an import, anyway.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile

Acer CloudMobile moves to China, dumps Android for Aliyun originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 Sep 2012 08:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.