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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.
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?
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.
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.
HELLO?! WHAT?! No, I'm on Linux! LINUX! No it's rubbish! Yeah, I have to worry about dependencies and all that bollocks! Ciao!
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
Come one, it's got linux in the title, does that make it news?
You bet it is. One of the big three mobile phone manufacturers has said it's not going to be following the rest of the herd with Symbian but is going with an alternative. That in itself is huge news - the mobile phone market is gigantic - almost certainly the single most important embedded software market - and Symbian was expected to walk it, and win over every major manufacturer. Instead, as we see, it's not. Even without looking at it from a Linux perspective, it's a big thing.
At the same time, from a Linux perspective, it's even bigger. It's an enormous win, it'll keep MontaVista and their partners afloat for years. It's also a huge boost to Linux's status in the embedded world - a manufacturer as large as Motorola doesn't choose an OS for their phones lightly. This is a market Microsoft has been spending hand over fist to get into, and failing apart from with a few niche players (one of whom, Sendo, very publicly dumped Microsoft for Symbian)... and yet Linux waltzes in with no budget behind it and captures a Big Three manufacturer without even trying, and in the face of competition from Symbian who have a very very sharp phone OS of their own.
So yes it's news.
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?!
...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.
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.
This is very good news! All it takes is a couple large companies like this to adopt Linux (e.g. for embedded systems, perfect use for Linux).
Everyone on slashdot loves desktop PCs and laptops, but the vast majority of computing power in the world exists in embedded systems like in your car, home appliances, portable gadgets, etc. These little systems really run the world.
So when embedded systems engineers get hooked on Linux, believe me, that's huge.
...if you recompile your phone's kernal.
;)
:p
Every time you add a new number.
still, I can start sending my business card as an rpm
I hope Motorola will include Xkillbill on their phones!!
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
The new, Linux-powered, easy-to-use SmartPhone! To make a call, just enter the IP address of each router!
I say this as someone who was actually contracting for Motorola, when a rant came down from management demanding that everyone use Motorola phones. I wonder if anyone was actually brave enough to actually tell him why none of the workforce were using their phones...
Anyway, I hope the situation has changed and management has gotten a clue. No one will eat a cake that looks like a giant dog turd even if it is made of delicious marzipan. The same goes for running Linux in a phone.
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.
You just can't see it.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
tell that to PIXAR who just purchased a 1024 node blade server running Linux.
Tell that to SGI who have a 64-way Itanium running Linux...
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.
I'm not so sure. For starters, modifying GPL'ed software does not require you to make the source available, distributing it does. The software isn't, strictly speaking, being distributed, the phone is. I'd imagine that this would still count as distribution for licensing pruposes, but I can see the potential for Motorola to claim that it's not necessary. Obviously, the right thing for Motorola to do would be to make the source available, I guess we'll have to wait and see.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
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.
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.
"does this use of Linux in Motorola phones make it less likely that it will be used widely as a desktop? I think Linux is rapidly becoming viewed as an appliance engine."
In breaking news today, IBM, HP, and Sun Microsystems have officially dropped their plans for Linux becuase, quote, "Linux is just an appliance engine."
Meanwhile, sales of desktop Windows have crashed as the public has come to terms with "Windows only being a game console OS."
I guess I would tell the parent to "lighten up" if he was not already modded "Insightful."
Before you mod me down, please realize that I could have been a coward and used my mod points to mod the parent down, instead of posting a reply.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
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.
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.
Apparently this phone is so clever that if your wife calls when you're with your mistress, the phone will kernel panic.
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
We all know that technical merit is the sole deciding factor of sucess in the market, right?
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.