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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."
Hmmm! will the source code be posted for it?
It seems as Windows and Linux will meet at yet another frontier. Desktop-wise Windows is holding strong and no break-through seems to be near. Server wise, I'd say that Windows is loosing, but only slowly and more work will be needed. In the portable area, both Linux and Windows are relatively new players, but Linux is better suited. Hopefully this will mean that more developers start using (and liking) Linux, and thus help Linux in other areas.
As for the phones; Can I make a call from bash?
why I need any OS on my lower-end phone. I just want to make some calls!
I'm all for Linux but I'd have to say this is just a marketing strategy. Motorola is desperate.
I'd be interested in what kind of hardware they are using. I built a Linux-based cell phone a while back (uses VoIP w/ WiFi) and the best hardware I could find was still somewhat clunky (PDA sized) and cost about $400. I'm looking into rebuilding the software into tablet and wearable form factors but I'd sure love to find a cellphone sized device that ran Linux that I could hack on.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Cool... my phone has locked up a few times... maybe this'll fix that.
-Derick
Now what am I gonna do when I go buying my next mobile? As a Finn I should of course buy a Nokia, since doing that won't send all my money abroad. But in the other hand I want to have Linux in my phone. Buying it would of course send my money even out from the EU, which is a bad thing. And knowing the current political situation with NATO, Germany and all I'd rather not buy anything from USA.. But even though Nokias Series 60 -plaform is /somewhat/ open, I'd like the idea of truly free OS in my phone very much. And if I could get a console on that motorola.. *drool*
Now what am I going to do?
Where have your banknotes been?!
Outsiders agree. "The story here isn't really Linux on cell phones. It's Java running on Linux," Jackson said. "It's more about it being a bigger part of Motorola's Java strategy than it is about the efficacy or viability of Linux."
:-/
That's just wrong. The story is about selling more phones. How to do that. Easy: Put (java)games, (java)PIM applications, (java)Chat, (java)anything on the phone. A second bonus is ofcourse that linux runs on top of the PPC arch that motorola develops. It's also worth noting that now that Apple is flirting with IBM motorola needs customers for it's PPC line. It all makes sense: Let one division of motorola use the chips that the other division produces.
I'm only worried about what all this does for battery lifetime of my phone
Thomas S. Iversen
Ok , perhaps I'm being slightly sarcastic but IF they decide to make the phone into a handheld computer too then the opportunites to hack it could be quite large especially if it runs TCP/IP over the phone network. Ok , this can happen already with handheld computers but people who use them tend to be a bit more tech savvy and almost expect something nasty to happen. Joe and Flo Sixpack however won't have a clue and won't understand what it means to have their phone "owned" or "rooted". Imagine a virus running on the cellphone system.... nasty...
This certainly seems interesting, having also political consequences discussed above, but my understanding is that only a single process will execute on these mobile phones: the Java(tm) interpreter.
Rationale: Licencing Symbian or Windows (whatizzit? Mobile Edition?) for a mobile phone may shorten the development cycle, but a) it costs real money (with per-unit charges) and b) you give up control of your platform. With all solutions you will need to code support for your extra gadgets (e.g. the camera, keypad circuitry, LCD screen, battery status, and let's not forget the basics: GSM chipsets). Since the phone will use Java, it will need to support the MIDP, therefore the interpreter will need to have access to these features anyway. So, why code your OS (as in, what the user will see on the display) in native code when you can use Java?
I'm currently planning to buy an Ericsson T800 when they'll be available where I live (Greece); I'd buy a Motorola phone if I could get my hands on all the source and java classfiles (the decompiler is your fried, together with the global search-and-replace - think unobfuscation). However, I don't expect I'll get the source for the more nifty features of the phones....
(Posting this using a laptop to an Ericsson T39 to the 4.0-second-round-trip-time GPRS network.)
The article talks about MontaVista, but they just purchased Lineo's Embeddix assets.
Kind of weird
Ok, a little tough to slog through, but check here. It's all in Japanese, but if you look to the bottom left you'll see a category labeled Java. The columns to the right show the maximum size for Java applications (I think it's the maximum size for all Java apps, not for individual apps). Along the top are the names of the models (D05, D06, K51, etc.)
A key for the models:
- D : Dentsu
- K : Kenwood
- N : Nokia
- P : Panasonic
- SA: Sanyo
- SH: Sharp
- T : Toshiba
If you look around a bit, you should be able to find better links, but this is the first one that came to mind. Sony doesn't make phones for J-Phone, just Docomo and AU, so they aren't listed.Or, just for fun, even though you probably can't read it, check out the phones at J-Phone's official page. Note that non-full-color phones are no longer sold in Japan, and that all J-Phone phones come with built-in cameras. One of the new Docomos has TWO built in cameras (seems a bit excessive to me, though).
Technically, this should be a no-brainer. PalmOS is effectively a 16bit platform dedicated to organizer functions, with other uses as an afterthought; and Palm is currently in transition between PalmOS4 and PalmOS6 anyway, two very different architectures. Microsoft's phone platform is the usual bloated, buggy, messy stuff we have come to expect from them. Only Symbian is pretty decent, but it is proprietary. The Linux APIs (i.e., UNIX/POSIX) have a three decade history. They are mature and scalable to small devices, and Linux itself is as well. And huge numbers of programmers know the Linux APIs.
By 2006, IDC believes Symbian will have increased its market share in powerful phones to 53 percent from its current 46 percent. Microsoft will have about 27 percent of the market, with Palm at 10 percent. IDC predicts that Linux could take as much as 4.2 percent.
I see: the reason why Linux will have a hard time is because we say so.
"It's more efficient to work with (Linux) because there are more modules we won't have to develop ourselves." [...] "By using Linux instead of Symbian or Windows, they are in control of their own upgrade cycle,"
Seems like Motorola really has their act together. Good to see. If they deliver on their promises, my next phone is likely going to be from Motorola.
A year ago, I was working on Motorola's primary phones. In fact, I worked on the v60, v120, and a couple others.
There is no way in hell I think that Motorola will use Linux on most phones....maybe the high-powered ones. I won't name any specifics out of fear of breaking confidentiality, however their current phones operate a real-time OS on a microprocessor that is roughly fast as a 80386. Flash ROM storage was less than 16mb, and RAM was less than a megabyte. Real-time tasks had to respond to an interrupt in less than a microsecond for certain things.
Sure, they can build a phone that runs Linux. However not without fuel-cell technology to power them. Linux will have to run as a separate task in a real-time kernel. And to do so will require a more powerful processor which of course requires more either a much-larger lithium ion battery, or something revolutionary like fuel cells.
I know, I've been saying the same thing. Then I get hit with a Troll.
;-) When I get home, I can upload my PIM to my computer.
---This has nothing to do with the general "popularity" of Linux. Test time: Name any of the 10+ other operating systems used in embedded devices? Can't name them? Exactly.
1: QNX
2: Engineer programming group #1
3: Engineer programming group #2
(and so on)
That's the last thing you want for embedded stuff is an OS. Unless it's an RTos, you just dont use it. Usually, in embedded programming, you first design a flowchart (along with specs req'd) for your system. Then you find components that match the spec AND are most cost efficent. Then you start coding. It's either ASM(in the assembly of the chip you're working with) or C. If you need tight code (say your chip only has 16k onboard ram), you go with asm. Either that or buy a chip with more ram. You almost never want to buy ram chips. Raises devel costs too high.
---There's getting to be a more than a little annoying "Linux is the only operating system and should be used in everything from PCs to microwaves" rally. Doesn't that sound a whole lot like what Microsoft has been saying since the mid 1990s?
I use whatever works. For a while, I used Windows cause it supplied what I needed (and linux wasnt very good). Now I do more programming and "hacking" I use a system that shows its underbelly (linux). If windows did this, i might still be on it. For my PDA, I use a TI-86 graphing calculator. It has 90k ram which for me, is plenty enough for a shell, games, and a basic PIM. And it does complex math too
What pisses people off is saying I USE WHAT WORKS.
Go over here and look at the breath of software that has become available for the Zaurus in a very short timespan.
Most of this is a port of already existing software made for other platforms. The reason is the underlaying Linux kernel. Had the Zaurus been based on QNX even with QT support we would not have seen near the amount of SW. (Check the nifty Audrey based on QNX as an example of the latter)
Help fight continental drift.
By switching to an established OS, like Linux or MS's new phone OS, they can by-pass the problem of writing a new OS, maintaining it, testing it, etc.
I would say the switch to Linux is more a financial one, as Motorola hasnt been on the money-making end of things for quite a while (RISC processors losing out to Intel, Apple probably going over to Intel, losing the cell phone wars to Nokia, etc). Since there is about zero cost using Linux as their base platform, they can bypass the royalty fees to MS, and increase their profit per phone. Or they could just charge less per phone, but I would imagine they are more interesting in profit per phone than volume sales.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.