Tech startup: I really do make mobile phones!

Chapter 53 The Birth of Orange OS 1.0
Inside Orange Technology's small workshop.

"Go away! It's just a 500 yuan bonus!" Chen Mo teased with a disdainful smile, "Why are you acting like you've eaten bee droppings?"

"Brother Chen! This isn't just a 500 yuan bonus; this is the seed money that will allow me to 'transform into a dragon when the winds of change blow'!"

Zhao Tiezhu folded the five banknotes and put them in his pocket.

"After deducting the 75 yuan expense over the past two days, I have 425 yuan left. Maybe I can win five million yuan by buying a dozen or so lottery tickets!"

“Then,” Zhao Tiezhu said with a beaming smile, “I’ll rent the entire floor of the SEG Plaza for Orange Technology, so Brother Chen can take the elevator to and from get off work every day!”

He suddenly thrust the money in front of Chen Mo, winking and smiling.

"How about you sponsor some more, Brother Chen, to make it an auspicious number, 499, which is exactly the price of our 'Orange 1'. Maybe we'll hit the jackpot!"

Chen Mo chuckled, picked up the screwdriver handle from the table, and banged it on the table.

"Look at you, so pathetic. You're even too cowardly to have a daydream?" He chuckled. "If you ask me, we should at least empty the billion-dollar prize pool and buy the Cyber ​​Tower!"

"No, no, no!" Zhao Tiezhu waved his hands dramatically, "I'm not a staff member of the lottery center!"

As he spoke, he imitated the way the lottery center staff argued in the recent news.

"How could I possibly claim it fraudulently!"

"I only collected it on behalf of someone else!"

He lives abroad.

He voluntarily withdrew from the award.

The rust stains on Zhao Tiezhu's work pants swayed back and forth with his movements, looking extremely comical.

Chen Mo was so amused that he slapped the table, and his laughter startled the sparrows on the power lines outside the window.

Indeed, even reborn individuals probably can't overcome the lottery's bugs.

In addition, Chen Mo didn't pay attention to this in his previous life, so he had no chance to try!
He stopped smiling and said seriously, "You rascal! Don't actually use this money to buy lottery tickets. Even if you have extra money, you should be more careful with it."

Zhao Tiezhu is now incredibly mature in both his personal conduct and his work.

Sometimes, Chen Mo would subconsciously forget that he was still just a child who had just come of age.

Kids like Zhao Tiezhu, who are older now, are probably all preparing for the college entrance examination!

It can only be said that children from poor families mature early. The early social trials made Zhao Tiezhu lose the naivety that his peers should have. He tasted the bitterness of society too early, and used his recklessness as a protective shield.

"I know, I know!" Zhao Tiezhu took two steps back and patted the pocket containing the money. "Brother Chen! Tell me, do you think I, Zhao Tiezhu, am the kind of person who wastes money?"

Chen Mo thought about it carefully. Ever since his "ex-girlfriend," whom he had never even held hands with, ran off with the blond-haired guy riding a ghost fire, he really hadn't seen him spend much money.

"Alright! I'll believe you this once, you little rascal!" Chen Mo smiled. "You've worked hard these past two days, so I'll let you rest this afternoon!"

Zhao Tiezhu shook his head, noticing Chen Mo's bruised eyes, clearly indicating he'd been staying up too late these past few days.

With time running out and the task heavy, since he believed in the smartphone boom that Brother Chen said Apple 4 would bring in June, Zhao Tiezhu naturally had to do his best to stockpile hardware resources before the wave.

"Brother Chen! I'm young, I can handle it!" The kid raised an eyebrow and struck a standard but somewhat comical fitness pose with his lean, wiry body: "But you, you need to take more rest!"

"You little brat, you've gone too far! You're even telling me what to do now!" Chen Mo waved his hand with a laugh. "You're ungrateful for my kindness. If you can handle it, go work on chip development!"

“Alright! The timing is perfect, there aren’t many customers at the stalls, so it’s a good time to explore the chip business.”

He bent down, picked up a bottle of mineral water stacked in the corner, and gulped it down.

This small workshop doesn't have a water pipe, which is a problem. Given the chance, Zhao Tiezhu really wants to move Orange Technology into the building so he can commute there, just like he said before.

"Phew~" He put down the empty plastic bottle and breathed a sigh of relief. "Don't worry, Brother Chen! My old Zhang said he heard that there's a batch of goods that needs to be shipped urgently from the middleman who gets the goods from the Lianfa Ke distributor. I'll go check it out!" Watching Zhao Tiezhu's hurried departure, Chen Mo called out with a smile, "If you can find a good source of goods today, I'll treat you to lamb kidneys on the grasslands tonight!"

Zhao Tiezhu suddenly turned around and walked backwards, his face beaming with two rows of big white teeth.

"Brother Chen, you'd better remember what I said! Once I've figured out the chip supply chain, I'll not only want lamb kidneys, but also two dozen halibut!

After saying that, he disappeared around the corner of the street in the blink of an eye.

Chen Mo smiled and shook his head, then sat back down at his laptop at his workstation.

The blue light from the screen reflected in Chen Mo's eyes, and the Android code was jumping around rapidly.

His fingers froze on the keyboard; the code he typed in his past life was completely different from what he was doing now.

With ten years of technological updates, many system codes have been completely transformed. He had to convert the code he remembered into the current format in order to fit it into the framework of Android 2.3.1 in front of him.

So these past two days, while reskinning Android 2.3.1, Chen Mo has been stumbling around due to the differences in code format between the two eras, thus wasting a lot of time.

Things like changing the dynamic logo of Orange Technology at startup and replacing Android 2.3.1 with Orange OS 1.0, and disabling Google's three-piece suite, were easy. Chen Mo quickly got the hang of it after becoming familiar with the code format.

The difficult part is the supplementary protocol at the system level. First, it needs to restrict the capacitive screen to single-point touch, so that the system will not respond to the user's three-point touch. Second, it needs to restrict the system's multi-tasking mode in order to make use of the limited memory.

Fortunately! Unlike the massive amounts of code in later Android systems, modern Android systems can easily handle system-level code additions and feature restrictions.

Later Android systems, after multiple iterations, are so powerful that even small, inexperienced manufacturers, or those that simply reskin the system, can crash it.

Just after Chen Mo finished supplementing the system code, he prepared to pre-install the TouchPal input method to replace the native Chinese input method on Android and simulate the actual running effect of Orange OS 1.0 on the native Android SDK emulator.
Suddenly, the system, which had been absent from Chen Mo's mind for a long time since the gaseous lithium battery solution was provided, emitted a mechanical prompt.

[WARNING! Unauthorized software use! This triggers Clause 4 of the restriction agreement—sales generated from illegal or abnormal business activities will not be eligible for R&D points!]

The glaring red words flashed wildly in Chen Mo's mind three times before gradually fading away.

Chen Mo thought to himself, "This is troublesome," scratched his head with both hands, and then rubbed his temples with his thumbs.

Go against Tiangang!
In the domestic mobile phone market, Chen Mo had only ever heard of software companies paying mobile phone manufacturers for pre-installed and promoted applications; he had never heard of mobile phone manufacturers paying software companies.

But! This isn't really the system's fault, because TouchPal never intended to develop the domestic market.

Therefore, since TouchPal is not promoted in domestic app stores, it is naturally impossible for it to obtain an authorized app license through legitimate channels.

Now Chen Mo was in a real headache. Using the native Android was full of errors, and he had to switch to multitasking mode to open a separate Chinese character input method. Wasn't that ridiculous?
As for the mobile input methods that everyone is familiar with in later generations, such as Sogou, Baidu, Xunfei, etc., they all had to wait until October when the counterfeit smartphones in North China exploded in popularity before they saw the potential of the mobile terminal and began to enter the market one after another.

Because the RAM that Chen Mo allocated to the Orange 1 phone was very precious, the Orange OS 1.0 system added restrictions that did not support users switching to multitasking mode to run multiple applications; at most, users could only run two instances.

If a user runs two apps simultaneously for an extended period, the Orange OS 1.0 system will automatically kill the background app when the system's cache is insufficient.

Input methods, being low-level system applications, must be pre-installed into the system layer; they cannot wait for users to install them and occupy RAM, or be killed directly in the background.

The Orange 1's memory configuration is: 256MB DDR2 RAM (running memory) + 512MB (solid memory) NAND ROM.

With 256MB of RAM, the compressed Orange OS 1.0 system takes up 150MB, and temporary data caching takes up 10MB, leaving only 96MB of memory for user applications.

This leaves less than 100MB of RAM for users.

Although Android applications are now rarely larger than 30MB, Chen Mo knew that after the explosion of counterfeit Android devices in October, the memory occupied by Android applications would increase dramatically.

Even without bloat, the Orange 1 phone only needs to install one Android version of a digital antivirus to exceed the 45MB RAM requirement. If the user then runs another application, the system will immediately freeze.

Chen Mo would never allow users to install two separate input methods, thus occupying valuable RAM space.

Therefore, the TouchPal input method must be pre-installed in the Orange 1.0 OS system; otherwise, not only would the system need to be modified, but the memory configuration would also need to be changed.

That means Orange Technology is going to be the first unusual mobile phone manufacturer in China to pay for software licenses instead of paying manufacturers for software promotion.

(End of this chapter)