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As if there were only Opera and Microsoft. Ever heard of these people? Or these people, who seem to be coming up in the news a lot lately? Plus there's always these people, these people and these people.

The smartphone market is a very competitive place.

...are listed here. That's quite a list!

Getting anything onto a handset takes a very close relationship with the handset maker. That real estate is extremely limited and every bit is accounted for. I'd bet that MS is subsidizing their phone OS to gain traction and that's a dangerous gift for the handset makers to fall for. If MS does manage to capture a majority of the handset market, handset makers can expect them to raise prices and eat into their profit margins.

That said, Nokia is the big fish to contend with in handsets. Due to Symbian, MS won't get Nokia to buy in unless they can get everybody else to buy in first. MS has gotten Samsung, Siemens and now Motorola to at least try their OS. They've even gotten Ericsson to dabble in portions of it. Although they've yet to make quantifiable inroads, the relationships required to turn up the heat are well established and cannot be taken lightly by the remaining of the Big 8, namely Nokia, LGE, Panasonic, and NEC. Keep you eye on the Japanese handset market, they (not Europe or the Americas) dictate the direction of the handset market. If the Embedded Linux Consortium holds together, it could pose the single most significant barrier to the MS Smartphone ever gaining traction.

I hope Motorola joins in, as well. Then there's the Embedded Linux Consortium. I do hope they consolidate their resources.

On a different note, any news on the Motorola A760?

• Inder Singh, Chairman and CEO, LynuxWorks (Board Chairman and ELC President
• Dan Bandera, Program Director, Emerging Device Standards & Strategy, IBM Pervasive Computing (Board Vice Chairman)
• James Ready, CEO, MontaVista Software (Board Treasurer)
• Michael Tiemann, Chief Techology Officer, Red Hat Inc. (Member of the Board)
• Young Joo Kim, Vice President, Samsung Electronics (Member of the Board)
• Greg Wright, T/A AAA Computers (Board Vice President)
• Victor Yodaiken, Finite State Machine Labs (Member of the Board)

We've got TiVo type boxes with Hard Drives, and DVD type boxes with DivX...really what we need is a more generalized component-sized PC that works to augment out television viewing experience. I know it's been done before, but the public hadn't caught up with the idea of computational ubiquity. Now's the time for:

* Component-sized set top box format
* 20G HD (minimum) for recording shows and user apps
* Low heat processor (e.g. Transmeta or XScale)
* A embedded operating system of one kind or another
* CD-RW/DVD combo drive
* Video in/out, RJ-45 for connectivity
* Front port for wired/wireless keyboard/mouse/joystick

Something like this ought to be doable for less than $500. Advantage: DivX 3.11, Ogg, MAME. whatever you want would be just a download away. Of course, a hacked XBox is already pretty close to this already.

Lots of info on Embedded Linux at the Embedded Linux Consortium

No it is not overkill for a device like this. Linux is the only thing out there that scales down well enough with enough features to run on embedded systems and that you do not have to pay for. This is one of the things that makes devices like this possible. If they had to pay for another embedded OS the profit margin on something like this would go away. And keep in mind this is embedded Linux and it has already won in that marketplace. See the link to understand why.