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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?"
I know it's a big market opening up, but I have a hard time understanding why companies are going so far, as to focus all their efforts into making products that will work for China... Sure, there's lots of people, but a great many of them are poor, and couldn't care less if Cisco is making a router that deals better with the climate in China.
I think China has become an almost fictional ideal now. RIAA/MPAA have "piracy", and the electronics sector has "China". It's just become that thing that companies tell the investors is key, and if they can take care of it, money will fall from heaven...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It will be interesting to see how Nokia and others react.
Honestly, I don't see Nokia, Siemens and Ericsson (Sony) switching to Linux. They have invested time and money into Symbian, and they have the necessary market share (at least in Europe and the US) to sit tight. Japan is another huge market, but tightly controlled by NTT DoCoMo. Device there vary very little.
IMHO, it all boils down to the question whether China really is the market of the future. Sure, it has a large population, and there are currently no mobile phones. But is the infrastructure alread there? What good is a phone without the network? Most likely, they will focus on cities with a high population density. But that will also reduce the number of people, although I admit I have no idea how many chinese live in the urban areas and how many in the rural areas.
Bottom line: designing a phone exclusively for the chinese market can backfire. And why do so? A Linux powered phone may also sell in Europe and the US. Why neglegt those markets?
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
They'll do nothing. Just because Motorola is selling their share of Symbian to Nokia and using Linux as the OS on their phone doesn't change a thing.
Linux isn't the be-all and end-all to everything. Symbian is an excellent operating system designed for mobile phones and Nokia et al have pumped loads of money into Symbian and will continue to do so in the future.
It makes absolutely no business sense whatsoever to jump ship from a proven O/S to one that is the geeks choice just because one company has done so.
As far as Nokia is concerned, as long as Motorola don't use Microsoft, they're happy. Nokia, like others, fear that a market with Microsoft as the dominating software provider will turn the phone market into something similar to the PC market (with hardware vendors getting tighter and tighter margins and Microsoft raking in all the money).
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Anyone can start their own fork if they want to, but it would be a pain in the ass to maintain, and it would be a lot of work to incorporate any future improvements in the main branch into a new fork. That would be expensive, and there would have to be a pretty compelling reason to go to that trouble. I don't see why anyone would do that unless Linus and co. stop doing a good enough job at maintaining the kernel.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
IMHO, it all boils down to the question whether China really is the market of the future. Sure, it has a large population, and there are currently no mobile phones.
Sounds like you've never been to China or aren't in touch with the state of affairs of the country. When China decided to put in place a telephone infrastructre they went wireless, simply because it was the cheapest and fastest way to provide access to such a large teritory. To give you an idea of the coverage, check out the coverage map of China Mobile Communication Corp. Most people I met in China had mobile phones. In fact the coverage over there makes the setup in North America look terrible.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
A phone maker mostly benefits from being able to tinker with the system and not having to pay license costs per unit sold. Regardless of how Palm or Microsoft charge for licenses, they try to make money somehow with something similar to what linux folks have written for free.
A more important question is why Slashdot folks should bother (as normal user you never see the underlying software of mobile phones anyway). Here the point is that if a player comes close to dominating the market, they tend to lock out competitors from associated markets.
Example: If MS dominates the mobile phone market, they'll make damn sure that only Windows PCs or WinCE devices can connect to their phones. Similar things could be imagined if Palm dominated the phone market and you'd try to connect random PDAs to your phone.
If linux is the underlying OS, there is a moderate to high chance, that open protocols are used for linking a PC or PDA to your phone (Motorola, Nokia, Siemens has no direct reason to actively lock out other OSs or PDAs). Linux and *NIX folks might have to reverse engineer some protocols, but aren't expected to be actively prevented from doing so (e.g. through patents or DMCA-crap)
Just think though... you're right that the majority of the Chinese population is very poor, but remember that the 20% or so of the population who reside in urban areas is still a HUGE amount of people, and just a bit less than the entire population of the United States.
How would either of them be cheaper? Both Symbian and Linux are for low powered devices. Putting the code onto a chip would be the same cost.
Symbian 0 - Linux 0 (both equal, no points)
no licensing fees
True, however the reason behind the licencing fees is so that Symbian can recruit people and pay them to develop full time. If you were going to go with a Linux based solution you'd have to pay for the development yourself. Also, most of the companies who are using Symbian have shares in the company and agreed the licencing model themselves to directly ensure they don't get screwed. Symbian cannot do a Microsoft here and pull a bait and switch tactic since they are owned by the very same companies that they do business with.
Symbian 1 - Linux 0.5
competitive advantage
Symbian is already out there, already proven and already has applications written for it. Linux in the mobile arena isn't as proven, isn't already written with the mobile in mind (there would still be a lot of work required), requires that companies give away their competitive advantage (through the GPL licence) and has far less applications written for it.
Symbian 2 - Linux 0.5
I still see no reason to jump ship. Even if other companies jumped ship, it won't signal the death of Symbian.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
The issue, Mr. Silver, is applications. Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Siemens have all be very successful making radiotelephones, but none of them has a clue what to do beyond voice.
A camera on a phone is not going to generate network traffic.... when mobile phones first came out on the market people got a kick from saying "hi mom, guess where I'm calling from?" adding a camera will only generate a bit more traffic in the form of "look where i'm calling from," but it's not going to fill network capacity.
mobile phones, because they are small and battery operated, will never generate internet levels of traffic because for the simple reason the browser window is too small.
radiotelephone companies should be wise enough to know they are not experts in creating the content and applications needed to generate the amount of traffic wideband cellular needs to be profitable, but so far none of the giants has been willing to admit this... until now.
opening up the OS to Linux means that there will be a greater opportunity for small developers to create new applications to run on Motorola's mobile phones.
it's a clever move on Motorola's part which would seem to me to has little to do with whether or not Symbian, or Windows CE, is "better" than Linux.
the "killer app" for third generation phones remains to be found. Motorola's choice of Linux is an admisstion that they don't have one, and they don't have a clue what it will be... otherwise they would keep their OS proprietaty.
in other words.... the 3G killer app is out there waiting to be invented.
hopefully, the developer who invents it will not be stupid enough to make her killer app open source so that the big companies can rob her of her just rewards.
I have owned now three subsequent GSM generations of Motorola phones -- starting with the clunky big StarTac, moving on to the little one, and then finally settling on one the Motorola tribands ( I am in and out of the US a lot ) .
I have hated all but the first with a passion, and for only one reason -- interface design. Everything about these phones was non-intuitive and counterintelligent. To read ones own text messages would take at least 5 keypresses. The phone book display was set up so that only part of the number could be seen at one time, seriously stressing my short term memory.
Most irritating was the fact that the Yes and No buttons are inverted on Motos (vs. Sony Ericsson or Nokia) and hence when others would answer my phone for me, they would often disconnect the calling party.
I have since jumped ship to Nokia, now that their tribands are affordable, and have never been happier.
Somehow I predict a similar convoluted and dire interface (not to mention closed to the average hacker) for Moto's linux solution. Don't be too excited, I've worked with Motorola phones before, and hope to never again.
shooting is not too good for my enemies