Linux Gets Mobile (phone)

arclightfire writes "The Register are reporting that Motorola, one of major mobile phone manufacturers in the world, has decided that the future's bright, the future's penguin! The reasoning cited is the belief that China holds the key to the mobile phone market of tomorrow, therefore this future needs to be Linux; 'Not only is China potentially the world's largest mobile phone market, but it's also where most phones are built. Even more significantly, it's where the next generation of all mobile devices will be based, thinks Motorola.' Pax Linux?"

Comments

Re:In Communist China...

[jwang]

Yes, they do run Linux. Most people in the cities own mobile phones. In fact, there are more mobile phones in use than land-line phones.

You'd be surprised at how capitalist China is. It's fast becoming a highly affluent society, and the companies that get in on the market are going to win enormously - those that don't are going to be left behind.

I don't know where you got the idea that people can't afford electronics there, but it's a pretty dated notion. At least 10 years out of date, I'd say.

Re:Is a Linux phone hackable?

[jwang]

Yes to the first question. No to all the others, officially, although there is a Java API for writing your own programs. I think the lowest levels (radio communications, etc.) are protected and don't have explicit API access.

I suppose you could reverse engineer it but I don't know how hard or fruitful that would be.

Frameworks

[ultrabot]

Now they should just port the UI and other frameworks from Symbian. Having a (C++) source code compatibility w/ Symbian OS would be a boon.

It will be interesting to see how Nokia and others react. The interesting thing isn't that it is based on Linux, but rather the fact that it's using Java extensively. Will also the lower level stuff be done in Java? In Symbian circles most of the "serious" stuff is done in C++ (ish), but we'll see whether the sledge will turn at some point. Phones are (still) very memory-cramped environments, and require design decisions that differ from normal Linux application design.

Re:A760

[jwang]

I don't know where you get your information from, but I was involved in the development of the A760. In reality, the core phone functionality is built on Qt and can be extended via Java.

This is the same model all the Motorola PDA-phones have taken in the past. They've actually had them for around five years now, but the idiots in Marketing didn't think they'd sell outside of China.

By the way, you can tell your old boss that I have my own boss to decide whether or not to fire me.

Re:In Communist China...

[winkydink]

I don't know where you got the idea that people can't afford electronics there, but it's a pretty dated notion. At least 10 years out of date, I'd say.

The average annual salary in our high-tech company (about 75% engineers.. offices in Beijing & Shenzhen) is less than RMB100k (about US$12k), but yes, everybody seems to have cell phones...