China's Baidu announces a new mobile browser

Thanks to demand for low end Android handsets, China is expected to leap over the U.S. this year to be the biggest smartphone market in the world. With that in mind, the country's most popular search engine site, Baidu, has announced a mobile browser. It's quite a lucrative market in the region since in China, the number of those accessing the internet from a smartphone or tablet is growing twice as fast as the overall market.

Baidu says that the new mobile browser will support faster upload and download speeds and will allow users to run web-based applications. According to data from the China Internet Network Information Center, a government-authorized industry group, at the end of July 388 million Chinese went online via a mobile device. That is a 22% gain from last year and accounts for 70% of China's total internet users.

Baidu had a whopping 78.6% share of China's search market in the second quarter, far ahead of Google's 15.7% share in the period.

source: AP