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Linux to Power Most Motorola Phones
raffe writes "Motorola will begin selling its first cell phone based on Linux this year and says most future models will follow suit, a major sign of the growing popularity of operating system outside its stronghold on high-end computers."
But symian os is already OSS and probably better for mobile phones (since Nokia spearheaded the modular phone movement).
Now a Linux development kit for symian would be nice though.
Linux is GPL so any kernel modifications must be posted. However, loaded modules can be held closed. Also all software running on the Linux kernel can also be kept a secret.
As the article says, the custom software will run in Java running on Linux, so it will be a JVM hosted by Linux, but Linux will probably not be visible to the end user.
And when speaking about Java applets running on phones. That has been done by both Ericsson and Nokia for a while now.
You will need an OS since most future phones will be built from a common platform and then targeted by altering of software, and perhaps gadgets. Thus a low end phone can just be a high end one running less cool software, will less memory and slower CPU. (just like low end computers).
I hope that you understand the need for an OS on higher end phones, so I will not go into that.
...the butt awful interface on every motorola I've ever used.
Actually seriously, all motorlas I've use right up till the v66 are appaulingly horrible to do anything with. Before I would actually buy one they really need to sort this out. Reading a text message was an exercise in hell ffs.
You need an OS because otherwise the phone would sit there doing nothing. They are all controlled by a microprocessor, and there is a lot going on in a modern phone. Some sort of concurrent OS is needed, so the phone can do many things at once (scan keyboard, handle GSM codec, handle RF and IF stages, display stuff, so on). It makes a certain amount of sense to use a tried and tested OS kernel, although why they want it to run Java I don't know. It should be written with the tightest code possible to make the most of the tiny CPU.
Its worth noting that Yamaha (the music gear maker, not the motorcycle maker) announced recently that they would be using an embedded version of linux for most of their keyboards in the near future.
For those of you who don't know what this guy is on about, see this: on a boat in holland.
Imagine the same thing, over and over, in different situations (at a restaruant, in a cinema, on a bus etc).
is here. I can't find a picture of the device anywhere. Does anyone know whether it will run QTopia? If so, the QTopia platform (already adopted by Sharp and IBM) will be getting some useful momentum.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
And when speaking about Java applets running on phones. That has been done by both Ericsson and Nokia for a while now
And, in Japan, on Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, Sharp, Toshiba, Dentsu, and others' phones.
Nokia is just buying its technology from Sanyo and passing it off as its own in Europe and North America, as is Ericsson with Sony's technology.
I think what Motorola is doing is smart - like the article said, by using Linux/Java they're controlling their own destiny a bit more. The part that I don't understand is that Motorola is part owner of Symbian. It seems to me that they would want to promote that platform instead of going off in a different direction entirely.
But if you just ignore that for a sec, I think choosing Linux is the right thing to do from a power/scalability perspective. Symbian, for example, was designed from the ground up to run on mobile devices. But since these devices are now becoming more and more powerful (like a circa 1995 laptop) you're going to need an OS that can take advantage of that power in an open way and I'll vote Linux any day (like all the rest of you, I'm sure).
Think about this: Motorola (and Nokia) are both going to sell around 400 million smart phones in 2003. Even if a very small percentage of these phones initially use Linux, it will still mean millions of Linux "installs". Motorola could soon be the #1 Linux computing platform.
If you check out Motorola's home page, you'll also see that they've launched a reference platform for OEMs called i.Smart to base their mobile phones on also. According to this article on InfoSync.no, this will allow OEMs to create smart phones in as little as 90 days with support for Symbian, eLinux, Windows CE or PalmOS. This is pretty cool, but what is disappointing is the complete lack of WCDMA/CDMA2000 (i.e. 3G) support in either the A760 or the i.Smart reference design. They need to just pay Qualcomm some ransom money and get on board the CDMA train, IMHO.
I've got lots more thoughts about this. From what I've seen so far, I can't tell if Motorola is going to follow Sharp's example and make the Java Apps peers with the native apps using Personal Java, or whether they'll restrict the functionality and use J2ME, which keeps Java apps in a tightly controlled sandbox. That could really make a difference in the number of apps available and usability also.
Anyways, cool news to see.
-Russ
Me
Who cares what OS is running underneath if the software subjects you to hellish reams of menus and extra buttons when competing phones from Nokia or whoever just seem to work with a few clicks?
You do get used to them, and they all have a quick-access menu for the most common functions, although I agree they're a real pain when you want to do something that's not on the quick-access menu. The most recent Motorola phones have improved a heck of a lot though, to the point where they're better than most Ericssons at least (5 submenus to divert all calls on a T39! 5!), even if they're not quite up to Nokia's (or Samsung's - very impressed with their menu system) standards.
The supposed problem with them was that their GSM development team was a bit low-priority until recently, because GSM wasn't big in the US... their US TDMA, CDMA and iDEN phones have always been better. Of course that's changing now given the move towards GSM in the US, and surprise surprise, their GSM phones are getting easier to use.
One nice thing about Motorolas is that their software has always been rock-solid stable, unlike some Finnish manufacturers...
Lose != win
Loose != tight
Umm, Lose is not equal to tight either, and neither is Loose equal to win. I think you meant:
Lose == !win
Loose == !tight
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Motorola, of course, is one of Symbian's owners.
it's in my head
The OS itself and its subsystems (GSM/GPRS, IR/BT, camera, voice recognition, etc) aren't written in Java; they're written in very tight, small, fast code, usually C or C++ with bits of assembler. But the phone supports a Java engine so it can run Java apps, which makes it easy for 3rd party developers to target the phone. Like Microsoft did with Windows in the 90's: encourage the developer community, and your product gains mindshare.
Chuck Norris: Socialism == a thousand years of darkness.
No need to put Linux inquotes. Linux isn't (nor should it be) much more than a scheduler, memory management, hardware abstraction (drivers) and some low-level protocol abstrations(IPv4 stack, etc.). Almost all of the drivers and protocols can be configured out of the kernel at compile time, so of course the cellphone manufacturers aren't going to compile in all of the options (nor include them as modules). What you're left with is a scheduler, a vm subsystem, a virtual filesystem subsystem, and a handful of drivers and kernel-implemented protocols. What did you think "Linux" was?
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
Would you care to elaborate on how Linux is perfect for embedded systems?
Because it's easy to strip it down to the absolute bare minimum you need - you get all the code. For the same reason it's easy to bugfix. It's robust and well tested. It's fast. With the preemptible kernel patch it does soft real-time very well, and can do hard real-time with other extensions. It has device drivers coming out of its ears. It supports all the same APIs that full-blown desktop/server Linux does, so you can develop and test the application software on a Linux PC and then it'll run on your embedded system. This also means there's enormous quantities of pre-written software you can use to help out, and most of it is free. It's ported to every CPU architecture you can think of, and probably a few you can't. If you don't have an MMU, well, there are versions of Linux that can do without. Most importantly of all, it's either free or cheap, depending on whether you do the work stripping it down yourself or whether you get an embedded Linux vendor to do it for you.
The only real black mark against it as an embedded OS is the lack of hard real-time as standard, but this is fixable, and irrelevant to most embedded apps anyway. Otherwise, yes, it is pretty much perfect for embedded systems. Why do you think it's doing so well? :)
Remember that Motorola owns Metrowerks. Metrowerks just recently bought Embedix, the company that formerly was Lineo. That means Motorola now controls a major chunk of embedded Linux intellectual property. Yes, lots of it is GPL, but Lineo also developed a lot of their own IP around the Linux platform that Motorola can now leverage.