OnePlus has sold 500,000 of its flagship phones so far. Aloysius Low/CNET OnePlus, the latest fledgling smartphone maker from China, has sold half a million units of its bargain high-end OnePlus One phone since April, the 8-month-old company has announced. Not content with that milestone, it hopes to hit a million devices sold by the …

Weibo Oppo may have just released the world’s thinnest smartphone with the 4.85mm R5 , but the company’s new-found fame may not last. A trending Weibo post showcasing images of a smartphone by China’s Vivo offers a glimpse at a device that’s just 3.85mm thick. In one of the published images, the mysterious Vivo device is posed next to an …

CEO Li Tao has ambitious plans for his company’s Apus launcher. Apus Building a business is no longer regional. It’s international or nothing. Founded by Li Tao, a former VP at Chinese software giant Qihoo 360, Apus is dedicated to building the smallest, fastest, simplest user system for Android it can. The Apus has picked up more than 30 million …

CNET Two months after OnePlus officially unveiled its anticipated Android smartphone in May, Sina Tech reports that OnePlus is working on building its own ROM out of Taiwan to replace its current Color OS ROM (that’s used in its phones in China). This in-house ROM will be exclusively for the China market — international models will still use CyanogenMod. In …

Screenshot by CNET WeChat, the China-based messaging app maker, has officially made a foray into the wearable devices market. Wearables from iHealth, Huawei Honor, Lifesense, and Codoon that sport WeChat’s application programming interface (API) went on sale online in China earlier this month, according to WantChinaTimes.com. The market for such fitness bands and smartwatches in China is immature and fragmented …

Xiaomi’s handsets, such as the Redmi Note pictured above, have been selling well. Aloysius Low/CNET Xiaomi has announced that the company sold 26.1 million smartphones in the first half of 2014, a 271 percent increase over the last year in the same period. The company sold a total of 18.7 million phones in 2013, and it appears that Xiaomi is …

Justin Sullivan, Getty Images China boasts an early-adopter attitude toward technology, according to a report by GfK’s Roper Reports Worldwide, with 44 percent of Chinese Internet users willing to discover and try new technologies. Chinese millennials have been declared the “smartphone” generation, with as much as 92 percent of Chinese between the ages of 18 and 30 owning a smartphone, …

Stripe San Francisco-based startup Stripe has secured a deal with Chinese company Alibaba’s third-party payment service Alipay in a partnership that opens up western businesses to what accounts for half of China’s internet transactions. Stripe offers businesses and individuals the ability to make payments easily over the Internet, similar to PayPal. According to a blog post from Stripe, the company …

You can use the fingerprint scanner of the Galaxy S5 to make mobile payments. Josh Miller/CNET You don’t need to look at Alibaba, JingDong, or WeChat’s mobile payment service to tell you about China’s burgeoning online payments. Mobile payments in the country surged 255 percent year-over-year in the first quarter to 3.89 trillion Chinese yuan ($623 billion). This is based …