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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."
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'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.
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
And when speaking about Java applets running on phones. That has been done by both Ericsson and Nokia for a while now.
As indeed they have been on Motorola phones.
I believe they were the first in fact, on a US iDEN phone a couple of years ago, which hosted it on VxWorks.
It's good for Java, but Motorola had already committed quite heavily to Java on their phones - heck, you can't move for Motorola adverts promoting Java games on their phones on UK TV right now - just everyone expected them to choose Symbian as the platform for running Java on their next-gen phones, so this is quite a surprise.
You're right that it probably won't give Linux any end-user visibility, but it's still a big win, and it gives embedded Linux vendors a big name they can point at and say to their potential customers - "Look, they chose Linux, why don't you?". Good for MontaVista, good for other embedded Linux vendors, good for Linux as a whole.
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.
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....
Well if you go to Motorola's development site, you can get your hands on the SDK to develop Java apps to run on the phone just fine! I do (along with the Nokia, Sprint and Siemens toolkits for Java). In actual fact, most of the Motorola phones currently only support MIDP1.0, so you could just develop using the basic Sun toolkit.
If you want to develop Java I'd really suggest Nokia or Siemens though - as they have the best API extensions for accessing the phone-specific features (sound, vibration, media playback, extended image methods etc) - AND they are listening to developers! As mentioned, Nokia now have a dev environment for Linux, and Siemens have fixed the changes they made to the MIDP spec that caused so many problems (eg, the bug that caused images to re-scale if loaded using the standard API, but not if you used the Siemens-only extension).
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.