Wo! China Unicom OS Stumbles Onto the Wire

After masterfully working its status as sole seller of Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone in China, No. 2 mobile carrier Unicom (HKEx: 762; NYSE: CHU) has put a major dud online with the launch of a new line of phones powered by its self-developed smartphone operating systems called “Wo” (English article; Chinese news release). Now I personally think this company is on the comeback trail, in part due to government support, but this Wo strategy is totally misguided and doomed to die on the vine. It comes on the heels of rival China Mobile’s (HKEx: 941; NYSE: CHL) launch last year of its oPhone smartphone line. But those phones were powered by Google’s (NYSE: GOOG) Android, which has much stronger legs than Unicom’s, which appears to have no other support beyond Unicom itself. In fact, this move smells suspiciously like the latest effort in China’s near non-stop campaign to get its tech firms to develop proprietary technologies that they can sell to the rest of the world. I gives this latest Wo campaign a year or two at the most before the technology gets stopped in its tracks and dies a quiet death.