Can Linux Dominate Smartphone OS? 125
Jeryl Kesh writes "Does Motorola's roaring success with its Linux-based 'Ming' phones in China indicate that the open-source platform is now a serious contender against Symbian and Windows Mobile in the handheld device software platform arena?
The world No. 2 mobile phone maker, which debuted the Ming smartphone in March this year in China, shipped more than one million Linux-based units in China alone last quarter, according to research firm Canalys. However with Nokia refusing to adopt Linux, Symbian remains by far the top mobile device OS, according to Canalys, with a 67 percent share, well ahead of second-place Windows Mobile, with 15 percent of the market.
Eirik Chambe-Eng, the co-founder of one of the most popular mobile Linux platforms, Norway-based TrollTech, has also reportedly predicted a 'revolution' in the use of open-source software on phones and handheld devices. His contention was that Linux gives handset manufacturers and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) 'complete control,' and in turn keeps Microsoft and Symbian at bay."
Does that translate to customer savings? (Score:1, Interesting)
Thats all good so long as this translates to customer savings.... does it?
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]I hope so. (Score:4, Interesting)
I DO trust Linux.
Windows Mobile? 2nd place? My ass... (Score:3, Interesting)
Nokia Adopted Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
?? I smell FUD. They may not have gotten around to using Linux in their cell phones (yet), but as a company Nokia has definitely adopted [slashdot.org] and supports [nokia.com] Linux.
Re:I would say yes (Score:4, Interesting)
T-mobile is a prime example of this, and probably the worst. There are some well known vulnerabilities in their network which apparently allow (or perhaps used to if they've fixed this) dishonest users to access the internet no matter what service they're supposed to get if they've hacked their phones. They're depending on the phones themselves for authentication because they know that not many people are going to be hacking their phones right now.
Linux would make that *a lot* easier to do, wouldn't it?
Meamo anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nokia has also been quite involved with OpenSource, particularly with their KHTML based browser that ships on S60 phones.
The point being, Nokia actually seems like a prime candidate for a Linux device. I would be SHOCKED if they didn't have one in the works right now. I would certainly expect them to have one in the market before the end of 2007. Every indicator points in that direction.
Re:Linux demand is growing (Score:3, Interesting)
The FAT32 filesystem is a major liability for embedded devices. Because of the fact that the disk head must seek back and forth from the filesystem table to the actual data, the effective data bitrate decreases with time. This means that WinCE has a maximum practical encoding time of about 1 hour; after that, the filesystem driver just can't keep up. We don't have this problem when using ext3 under Linux.
I think you've been drastically misinformed here. Head seeking between the drive's metadata and the drive data itself should be largely irrelevant when it comes to throughput, because disk cacheing will cause the metadata to be updated at infrequent intervals. If you really are having a problem, then try increasing the WinCE cache size. ext3 has exactly the same issues when it comes to updating metadata. (You may wish to try running FAT32 on Linux as a comparison.)
WinCE doesn't have a native terminal; you have to recompile and reload the whole OS and application image in order to test a change of even a single line of code. Worse, you can't interactively debug the board because you have no way to send something to standard input.
Do you feel lucky with "wince console"? [rainer-keuchel.de] And no, you don't have to recompile everything on every minor change --- just update the modified applications.
Really, it sounds like your WinCE system integrations people don't know their job. In particular, your build times look very disturbing. 20 minutes for a relink? What toolchain are you using? Admittedly, I don't know what kind of material you get from Microsoft, and so don't know what's involved when doing a relink, but something sounds very wrong.
Symbian Signed making symbian Open Source harder (Score:5, Interesting)
Currently, there's loads of open source programs available for the symbian phones, especially series 60. With your choice of C++, Python or Java, it's easy to get started with writing code. Lots of apps drives consumer demand.
More recently, Nokia stopped supporting Linux for developing applications (previously there was decent support for Java, and help with C++). This makes it much much harder to develop S60 apps on Linux, so a load of potential developers won't bother.
The big issue now is symbian signed. With S60 version 3 onward, they've seriously locked down the platform. If your code isn't signed, it won't run on most devices, and even where it will, it won't be allowed to do interesting things (write to filesystem, talk to network etc). If you want to get your code signed, you have to have an expensive verisign certificate, and pay a bunch of cash to have your app reviewed.
In one fell swoop, almost all open source programs have stopped working on S60 version 3, and won't work again. All the developers are really pissed, and no-one's willing to talk about it from symbian (try emailing them about it, and they just mutter about python). All of a sudden, your new S60 phone is half useless, as you can't get any decent apps for it.
Not the brightest move ever.....
Re:Windows Mobile? (Score:3, Interesting)
According to everything I've read via Google, the phone is primarily for Asian markets.
"This Linux PDA-phone for Asia" [phonescoop.com]
The A1200 is expected to launch in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in mid-February, with US availability sometime after that. [linuxdevices.com]
As far as I can tell, this US availability has yet to surface and this phone is only available imported and is not actively sold/carried by any US provider.