Chinese smartphone company Vivo always urges to bring many innovative features to the smartphone industry including the latest popup camera in Vivo NEX flagship device. The company recently announced that they are joining hands with Tmall, subsidiary of China’s Alibaba, one of the largest e-commerce platforms across the globe, to establish a new “Smartphone Research Institute.” The announcement paves a vast way in front of the Alibaba group to enter the global smartphone industry.
The company officials said during the announcement that they plan to bring the “C2B” model in the smartphone industry. The C2B Model (aka Customer-to-Business) is one of the newest approaches in a business where consumers decide and involve in the business process, and companies consume them to build their products or to provide better services.
Coming to the Vivo’s concept, they decide to involve the smartphone consumers in designing an entire smartphone. Instead of releasing devices with design and specifications that the internal R&D team decides, the Vivo and Alibaba collect data from users and make custom devices according to it. So, buying new smartphones would become a DIY process, rather than just purchasing a ready-made piece of tech.
It is also to be noted that the new project by Vivo-Alibaba is not something merely like Google Ara project, which became a failure even before it entered the market. The Chinese company’s Mobile Research Institute will allow you to decide the smartphone design, hardware specifications, software/operating system preference. The smartphones will be manufactured using standard processes. It is not yet confirmed if the company has plans to provide smartphones with Operating System other than Android (like Alibaba’s AliOS).