Microsoft, China Unicom form alliance to boost sales of new systems (2)

In the third quarter of the year, smartphones running on Google's Android operating system held a whopping 90.1 percent share of the Chinese market, while Apple's iOS platform held 4.2 percent, according to figures released in November by Analysys International, a Beijing-based market research firm. In comparison, Windows Phone's market share appears too tiny to count.

"Microsoft has long had a good relationship with China Unicom, and the alliance further shows its ambition to gain a bigger foothold in the Chinese market by relying on China Unicom's faster 3G network," Roger Sheng, research director at consultancy firm Gartner Inc in Shanghai, told the Global Times Thursday.

The software giant is likely to initiate similar cooperation with China's two other carriers in the future for a firmer market position, Sheng reckoned.

While sales of the latest Windows systems may gain momentum in 2013 with an array of new products entering the market, Sheng noted the software giant had a long way to go before it could expect to pull even with Android and iOS.