While Google is huge in America and many other places around the world, Baidu is the biggest in China and are planning to get their own slice of the Android and mobile market. Google operates a big operation in China but is still behind Baidu in that region. China has a massive mobile market and it’s only getting bigger, they are aiming to build their own OS using Android at the center but call it “Yi”.

Yi will consist of Android but be stripped of anything Google and replaced with Baidu and have a beautiful user interface over the top, looking a bit like iOS and MIUI combined for a nice pretty UI. Dell sees this as an opportunity and is already planning a large hardware partnership with Baidu to launch their own smartphones and tablets running on the new “Yi” OS. Some being branded by Dell, and other by Baidu they expect this to greatly improve their mobile business.

Some analysts stated this is just Dell grasping at anything to help their ailing mobile business not to mention China still has a huge fan base of Apple products that dominate the market. While seeing 3rd party or custom “operating systems” running off of Android is nothing new, I do like to see what others come up with and how they will implement everything. Did you guys see the Google Android running Yahoo! Phone? This is what comes to mind although something tells me Baidu has a much better chance than Yahoo does.

More as this story develops.

[via SlashGear]