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China Launches Linux-Based Smartphone
An anonymous reader writes "This news item at LinuxDevices provides photos and specs of a new Linux-based smartphone being launched today in China. The device, called the E2800, sells for about $600, and targets business users, offering PDA functions, touch-screen, handwriting recognition, a camera, and memory expansion to 512MB through an SD memory card, the article says. The device's manufacturer is a Shanghai company named E28. The E2800 is a 900/1800MHz, GSM/GPRS class 10 device based on dual ARM9 processors, running embedded Linux with a 2.4-series kernel. Other recent Linux-based mobile phone announcements have been Japan's NTT DoCoMo's 3G phones and Motorola's A760."
Link to E2800
Does anyone know if the the phone comes with a written offer of source for the GPL'd bits, or a CD?
Do they make the source code available?
What if they don't? And more importantly, who's gonna make them?
They're their own country. They make their own laws.
GPL is based on copyright law, which is roughly the same for all signatories of the Berne Convention (of which China is one). So in principle it's enforcable against Chinese businesses or government operations in Chinese courts.
What that means is authors of the base code (or their assigns) might get Chinese courts to issue an injunction to block the distribution of the code or the selling of boxes containing it, if the source isn't available or is wrong. And maybe the government would enforce the injunction, to avoid reciprocal hassles protecting Chinese authors in international markets.
But the real teeth would be obtaining and enforcing injunctions against selling the product in other countries, for western hard currency, if the source isn't forthcoming.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
They have a download page. It seems to contain ringtones, pictures and some games. There is also a FAQ. Can anyone read Chinese?
I work on this sort of thing for a different company, so I can say a little bit about what's likely going on under the hood. This sort of architecture sounds pretty standard for a modern smartphone, whether it's running Linux, WinCE, or Symbian. There are tons of these gadgets on the market already, with more on the way. They could be doing something atypical, but the specs make it sound fairly pedestrian (other than the use of Linux, still rare) - hence, I'd assume they went for the cheap (standard) path. (And yes, $600 sounds, if not cheap, at least normal for this sort of thing. Your typical wireless network operator selling a phone at a lower price is subsidizing the heck out of it, and you're paying it back with a multi-year service contract. High end phones can cost this much, easy).
The typical pattern is just like this one: one ARM to control the wireless modem/dsp functions, running an RTOS, and another ARM to run the applications on an OS like Linux. So the dual processor aspect is pretty normal - probably nothing special about this phone. If it follows the pattern, odds are that the processors aren't SMP - they run separate OSes to keep the real-time function separate from the smartphone function under Linux.
All these smartphone designs draw on the heritage of "dumb" phones made over the last decade or so. A "dumb" phone would only have one ARM processor, and run the cheesy sort of text oriented UI that's been typical till recently. This is pretty much just an evolution of an old, proven design. Slap another ARM on it, running at hundreds of MHz, fabricated with a top end process to keep the current draw down, and there you go. The parts that go into this thing are made in huge volume, keeping costs down. Basically, we're talking about processes as high tech as the ones in top-end desktops, but designed for reducing current draw, not increasing MHz.
As far as battery life goes, the name of the game is to turn the processors and the radio off as much as is possible. The modem processors and radio are rarely turned on - they wake up periodically, sometime for a duty cycle measured in tens of milliseconds every few seconds to check to see if anyone's calling. If not, everything gets shut down for another sleep period. They only stay on when in a call, and when that's the case, the current draw due to turning the transmitter on is going to dwarf the draw of the processors and receiver themselves.
You can say similar things about the second ARM that's running Linux. There's a whole lot of time between a user pressing keys or the touchscreen. Typical PDA functions shut the processor down in between bursts of CPU activity. Start playing a MPEG4 clip, and you'll see the battery drain that much faster, though. If the user isn't doing anything, the normal case, the thing goes to sleep practically forever.
I think they don't exist, not in the way you want anyway, you can't get 'em off the shelf. You sure can get a devkit and then you can design your own board etc, but I gather that's not really what you mean.
If it has to be that small, it has to fit into specific case (such as a cell phone or a pda or...) and then it has to be custom designed anyway, so you get exactly the processor you want, with the amount of memory and other features you want. That's why there's no real market for very small boards, and even smallest "Off the shelf" stuff (currently micro-ITX I believe?) will always be a lot bigger than custom designed stuff at any given time.
Yes, for Japan, it's Docomo launches a Java phone and for America, it is Motorola launches a Java phone. For the poor small Chinese company, launching the Java phone is just part of its patriotic duty to the massive communistic collective?!?
Give the Chinese company a name and a face!!! They are not a faceless commies collective!!!
The company is called E28 and the phone gets launched is E2800.
No. One core runs the phone-stack, the other core runs the OS. It's pretty much like having two separate devices (usually linked via a serial connection) in a single enclosure.