What exactly are the cloud phones that Baidu and Huawei are working on?

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Recently, Baidu officially released the "Baidu Cloud Phone Flagship Edition". In March this year, Huawei also launched the Huawei Cloud Kunpeng Phone for the first time. What exactly is a cloud phone? Compared with traditional phones, what are its advantages and disadvantages? Will everyone have a cloud phone in the future?

Cloud phone, an "invisible" phone

What is a cloud phone?

According to Baidu's official explanation, "cloud phone" is an Android instance (operating system) provided to users/customers in the cloud based on public cloud and ARM virtualization technology. Users/customers can remotely control the cloud phone in real time through video streaming, and finally realize the cloud operation of Android native apps and mobile games.

In short, a cloud phone is a non-physical phone that runs in the cloud and provides services in the form of leasing. The entrance can be an APP or a cloud platform. In terms of functions, except that it cannot make calls or take photos, cloud phones are basically the same as traditional phones.

With cloud phones, even low-end phones can play all kinds of mobile games, and on terminal hardware devices such as computers and Pads, people can easily control cloud phones and call various files or apps. At that time, mobile phones and computers will only be used as a "screen".

"Cloud Phone" has highlights, and the key to its implementation lies in two points

This year, in addition to the two cloud phones launched by Baidu, Huawei released the "Kunpeng Cloud Phone", and Alibaba also launched the "Cloud Computer". It can be seen that cloud service providers are committed to moving traditional hardware to the cloud. The reason behind this is that cloud service providers are ambitious to further expand the cloud service market, and it is also a response to the limited space for hardware configuration performance improvement.

In specific application scenarios, what is the difference between cloud devices recommended by cloud service providers and traditional hardware devices?

Here we take application hosting in the Internet industry as an example. In the traditional model, companies often need to purchase a large number of real machines of different models from different manufacturers. With technological innovations in the process, depreciation costs are inevitable.

In contrast, cloud phones can be purchased on demand and used whenever they are purchased, and since they are not physical, companies do not need to bear the depreciation costs of the phones. Through API interfaces, companies can also control cloud phones in batches, issuing and using thousands of cloud phones at the same time, achieving high efficiency.

At the same time, as part of the service, various AI capabilities on the cloud will also be able to give "application hosting" more intelligence.

Another example is the gaming industry. In order to play games better on mobile phones, high configuration is necessary, which also means consumer spending. With cloud phones, players can easily run large mobile games on low-end mobile phones, and can flexibly adjust the configuration of cloud phones according to game needs without worrying about overheating, power outages, or disconnection, which greatly reduces the game's dependence on mobile phone hardware configuration.

For mobile game developers, the emergence of cloud phones also means that during promotion, users can try out the game without downloading, thereby improving the user conversion rate of game promotion to a certain extent while avoiding user disgust.

In addition, the emergence of cloud phones has also provided people with many conveniences in life, including file storage, one-click backup of mobile phones, etc., avoiding file loss, etc.

Judging from the above features, the emergence of cloud phones can be said to be a major subversion of traditional mobile phone hardware. However, this does not mean that cloud phones can replace traditional phones. At least from the current situation, it is impossible in a short time.

If you trace back to the origin, cloud phones are not a new thing. Before Huawei and Baidu entered the market, this product had already been developed by others, but the user group was concentrated on game players, and the number of active users did not reach tens of millions.

From this point, we can see that in the market, especially among the consumer group, the recognition of cloud phones is not high. The reasons behind this are two points, one is connection and the other is cost.

First of all, in terms of connection, since it is placed in the cloud, it means that if users want to use cloud phones, they must connect to the network, and a better cloud phone experience requires a faster and more stable network. In response to this, Sun Yanbiao, director of the First Mobile World Research Institute, once said that the best promotion point for cloud phones should be to achieve full coverage of China's 5G network, so that cloud phones will be recognized by more consumers.

Obviously, that time has not yet come.

In terms of cost, the current cost of 5G networks is generally acceptable to non-enterprise users. At the same time, cloud phones also involve cloud computing, in which the long-term computing cost and data transmission cost have also become obstacles to its implementation and popularization.

Overall, cloud phones can be seen as a trend in the future, but before the full coverage of 5G networks, its innovative effectiveness is still limited. Before the cost is reduced, this product is not suitable for the vast majority of ordinary consumers, and it is still more popular among enterprises.