China’s biggest search engine has buddied up with chip-maker Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) to
China’s biggest search engine has buddied up with chip-maker Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) to offer extra free cloud storage to people who buy certain Android-based, Qualcomm-powered smartphones. It’ll see Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) new Dropbox-like service, called WangPan, offering those new phone-owners double the usual cloud storage space.
The deal covers phones sold in China that are powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8×25 and 8x25Q chips. For people who don’t give a crap about what chips are inside their phones, it just means they’ll get more free cloud storage if they buy phones or tablets like the Huawei G330D/G330C (Ascend), Coolpad 7266, the K-touch W760, Hisense U950, or Lenovo S686. Not a hugely sexy list of hardware, but we noted last week that domestic brands now make up 60 percent of the China smartphone market – the top three are the afore-mentioned Lenovo, CoolPad, and Huawei – so this Baidu-Qualcomm deal has the potential to reach a lot of people.
How much extra storage is it worth? New phone buyers will get double the usual 15GB of Baidu Wangpan storage for free – a useful 30GB – for the duration of the phone’s lifespan.