Motorola Launches A760 Linux and Java Smartphone

securitas writes "Motorola launched its A760 Linux and Java smartphone in China today. The dual-mode GSM/GPRS phone uses a version of MontaVista Linux, Motorola's i250 chip for communications, Intel's 200 MHz PXA262 chip (based on the XScale PXA250) for computing with 256 MB RAM, and software that includes a personal information management application, digital camera, a video player, MP3 music player, and an instant-messaging tool. The A760 is the first of Motorola's Linux-based phones. Eventually Motorola plans to use Linux in most of its phones."

Comments

Re:Why Intel?

[Glock27]

I find it odd that Motorola, a maker of embedded microprocessors, would go with an Intel chip.

Yes, that is fairly strange. The low-power PPC chips are pretty nice.

However, the phone unit is most likely autonomous (and much more powerful than the chip unit, which may be sold and is unprofitable). Intel most likely had the best prices and specs (or convinced someone of that), and Intel got the deal.

Its really the way to do things, if you end up with a better phone product. If not, well...

Linux is almost irrelevant here

[BriSTO(V)L]

Everyone (at the time of reading) seems to be stuck on the linux-ness of this phone, with spurious speculation about gcc, bash etc. But the point is that the software development platform for these things will be: 1) Java 2) Not controlled by Microsoft or Symbian or Palm 3) See (1) etc... It may well indicate a new platform for open source software development, but it is not going to look much like any current paradigm, I suspect. Also, the 2 parts (phone and "computer", for want of a better word) will be highly separated to avoid people writing software to "adjust" their phone bills.