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Linux Powers Motorola's Smart Phone
An anonymous reader writes "Motorola unveiled the A760 at CeBIT and claims the handset is the first in the world to blend the open source operating system with Java software. As well as Linux, the A760 has onboard a camera, diary, e-mail program, MP3 player, speakerphone and colour touchscreen."
From this tutorial
Ok, just had to day that, I'm just glad that Apple "gets it" that synchronization is an important thing. Truth be told more phones synch with PCs, albeit after buying the breathtakingly over-priced custom plug and installing software of dubious stability.
Mebbe if we're lucky the industry will come to it's senses and adopt a standard plug, like USB, use it for charging too, and support doing imports/exports in a standard way also. Naww - never happen.
The universal USB charger is out there though, really sweet.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
They would waste >6 months and lots of money on development just to find out that the hardware has become cheap enough for Linux in the meantime.
linux is certainly going to be larger than a homegrown o/s
Not true.
Linux is opensource in case you didn't notice, which means you can do anything with it. So in theory, you could optimize it so much to be as small as an in-house system - and still save development time. Of course in real life nobody does this because ROM and RAM is cheap enough and optimizing everything down to the last byte takes by far too much time.
With Linux, you also get a very reliable codebase which is well tested on millions of different architectures and configurations. With an in-house OS, you need years until you get to the same quality of Linux.
Contrary to what you may want to believe, linux is not always the best tool for the job.
Well if design a new system with a CPU, it is - if you don't have any special requests like PalmOS (or some other OS) compatibility or some very narrow and specialized requirements. Even on most devices that don't necessarily need Linux, the faster time-to-market will make it worth it.
There are a lot of devices that use DSPs and no CPU - on those you of course can't and won't use Linux. But a DSP is no classical CPU.
Of course I am only talking about new developments, it might always make more sense to refine an older in-house software if available.
It's also an inside joke in Finland. Mr Proper is (was?) a household cleanser just like Vim :)
Non-US customers can ignore this post and might actually enjoy all the next generation gadgets. How is life in the 24th century?
:)
Sweet, the GPRS coverage in The Netherlands is pretty close to 100%. Rates are available from approx 1.5 EURO per MB, which is still a tad high. Then again, for WAP, one MB goes a looooooong way.
See you on the other side
I think a lot of folks aren't quite up on what a phone has in terms of resources that one can utilize well, especially for cool hacks and whatnot. Running linux on a phone is a good first step, but there's a lot more that needs to exist first.
First off, there's memory issues. Having replaceable flash memory is useful, but more often than not the cellphone stores it's programs in read-only high-speed (and thus expensive) flash that's either on the chip itself or very much part of the built-in phone. Phones are usually quite tight in terms of memory usage, especially smart phones like this; writing any permanent programs that run on the phone constantly must keep that in mind.
Another issue is single vs. multithreaded apps. Most cells are optimized to be single threaded, as it's faster, uses less CPU overhead and usually easier to program/debug. That removes a lot of the ability to do things like, say, add a global filter to the mix. It's not impossible, but you should keep it in mind.
Third, most cellphones require a fair amount of specialized hardware to reprogram the phone itself. Or reboot it in the case of problems. Not to mention images needed to reflash it if something goes wrong, the software required to interact with the hardware on whatever platform, etc. All of these things are possible, but they are hard to easily get around.
Motorola phones sucks a$$ anyways - have had a few and they all died prematurely on me. I will never own one again - Nokia or Sony Ericsson for me from here on, not only do they have more/better features but they actually work.