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This is News plus Special English. I'm Marc Cavigli in Beijing.
As smartphone users continue to debate the relative merits of Google Android and Apple iOS, a new operating system has entered the market, offering a Chinese-developed alternative to software of foreign origin.
The operating system, known as China Operating System, or COS, was developed by the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with Shanghai Lian-Tong Network Communication Technology Company.
The developers say the system has a number of key selling points, including applicability to a wide range of computer-based hardware, not just smartphones, and the claim that it fixes a range of existing programming bugs and errors.
They also point to COS as a product of Chinese origin, adding the release of COS aims to break the monopoly that foreign companies have on fundamental software.
By the end of the third quarter of last year, Google's Android had captured 81 percent of the smartphone market worldwide, leaving almost 13 percent to Apple's iOS.
Android held a 78 percent market share in China, while iOS held 16 percent, and Windows Phone held nearly 4 percent.
Lian-Tong Network Communication Technology says the next steps in developing COS are to promote its use on a wider range of hardware and to develop more apps.
In New Zealand, conservation officials were hopeful that most of a pod of 46 stranded pilot whales have made it out to sea after finding one dead animal on the coast at the top of New Zealand's South Island.
Department of Conservation rangers have found the dead whale on Farewell Spit and checked beaches in the area for any sign of the other 45 pilot whales that had refloated last Monday.
When rescuers left the Farewell Spit area late in the day, the whales had been milling in shallow water offshore for several hours.
The whales are the survivors of a pod of 71 that began stranding on January 18th.
Efforts to refloat them ended with the whales beaching again further along the coast.
It is the third mass stranding on Farewell Spit in less than two weeks.
Twelve pilot whales died and conservation staff euthanized another 27 after a mass stranding on January. 6.
Other nine pilot-whales were euthanized and five died after a second mass stranding on January. 14.
