Slashdot Mirror
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."
Do they make the source code available?
But the person on the other end always sounds like they're speaking Chinese.
Retail for $600 in China!! From the country that can't afford to purchase software and piracy so rampant you can buy any piece of software on the streets for $5. Yes, I'm sure this will do quite well.
Some technology in the phone that isn't talked about
It will automatically phone police when if you text "Falun Gong". Also the words democracy, voting and human rights will also cause the phone to dial the appropriate authorities to protect the poor citizen from potential harm. It also helps identify and track citizens that need to be re-educated.
Isn't technology great? **remove tongue from cheek**
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Link to E2800
I can see the ad campaign now...
Like that stupid Cheerios ad except instead of some middle-aged sad sack saying "I lowered my cholesterol," it would be a bunch of hopeless geeks running around muttering "cat /proc/cpuinfo".
I know I would :)
China still has some problems, but it seems they are on the path of improvement. Compare that to the US where I constantly feel we are on a declining path to destruction...
Sorry guys, but does anyone realize that the far world is leveraging west influences to bring prosperity to their country? Its not about freedom but economics. Support your local coffee shop
Now Chinese business men will be able to peruse the 5 websites their government allows them to view -- on the move! Plus they'll be able to speak with their business partners and family about ideas that are inoffensive to the government!
Stuff that Matters? No.
As cool as it is, these stories lost relevance when IBM put Linux on a wristwatch.
Whatever it is I'm complaining about, I'm sure the Republicans did it. This is
How the fuck was that insightful?
;-)
Ok mods how about this.
I imagine in the future we will be using...um...future things that are more futuristic than now. I forsee people using things that are futuristic. !!! I can tell the future I can.
First off, even if you put an Athlon 3200+ in a phone it's still a phone. You can't type at it and unless it has 99% voice recognition [for entering text] it's useless. Well actually more than that. Have you ever tried to read C source out loud?
I actually forsee a small market for these devices. I mean sure PDAs are trendy but they're not as popular as laptops or desktops. At my college way more people have laptops because while they're a bit bulkier they do have keyboards, guts and large monitors [my 14.1" laptop monitor is HUGE compared to a 2.9" or whatever the avg. PDA has] that make using the computer less than painful.
What will catch on are lighter laptops. If Compaq made my laptop in a "less than 7lbs" model I would be very very happy. However, I'm willing to carry it around [well it's not that heavy anyways] considering I get a nearly 100% sized keyboard, 14.1" screen, 768MB of ram, 60GB of disk, an Athlon-M 2400+ [barton!], 2USB, 1394, Ethernet, serial, parallel, PS/2, svideo, VGA ports, a floppy drive and a DVD-CDRW drive....
That's a bit more than in the avg 600$ PocketPC device...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
So what do you suggest - not carry any technology news that concerns China? Mentioning their abysmal human rights record every time they are mentioned?
/. mentions Sony? Oh, and for all of the above we can certainly bring up the dismal record on fair trade with the third world.
In all fairness we should be doing the same for everyone else as well: mention the thousands of suspected Al Qaeda people imprisoned in the US without a trial or defense attorneys whenever there is a story on Intel or Microsoft; mention the lurking racism and attacks on immigrants throughout much of europe whenever Nokia or an european Linux distro is mentioned; bring up Japans xenophobia and unresolved wartime issues whenever
As for Steve Jobs enriching himself - well, he is welcome to it. That is what the relevant licenses allow, after all. If you have code that "Steve Jobs used to enrich himself" and you are not happy about it, then you should perhaps have released it under a different license?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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 very substantial requirements.
Its gotta fit in the palm of your hand, not a laptop.
Its gotta work real time - when it rings and you answer it, you don't wait for processes to load or having it boot.
The thing's gotta run all day at least of nonstop run on a set of batteries!
I don't know just how they pulled this off... as I have always custom programmed my realtime embedded stuff - usually in 68000 assembler. Sometimes Atmel AVR, but damn near always in assembler. Using custom design, I can design for very low power consumption, but doing so really makes way for a lot of upfront investment in design time.
Running a 2.4 kernel. In your hand. All day. On internal batteries.... I am definitely impressed.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Ya know, people are going to become REALLY confused when phone processor speeds reach 900 and 1800 mhz.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
I forsee that in the future, we will be living in futuristic homes (deep, underground shelters), futuristic clothing (radiation protection and mask), using futuristic power sources (nuclear -- oh, the irony), largely replacing our transportation system (biologically powered bipeds), and eating prehistoric foods (grain lasts a loooong time, you know). And we will probably have some missiles left over, in case anyone else survived.
Just my $0.02
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
The Chinese are evil? That implies that the entire race of human beings who scrape food off the ground are somehow inherently "evil". As for the Chinese government vs. the American government, the similarities abound. One of the big hype words I hear alot coming from people describing China is "Communist." Although in practicality Communism (or Marxism) has nothing to do with popular opinion of Communism, the colloquial meaning of the word has come to be something like "Kills people for speaking out, is against 'freedom'". I hate to break the news, but the USA has its fair share of anti-sedition laws, take the Patriot Act for example. It is currently legal for the US government to accuse someone of being a terrorist and lock them away without trial. (Communist "witch-hunt" trials in the 1940's anyone?) Who's to stop the government from saying comic books are a "terrorist-like" medium and banning them? Anyone protesting could be called 'unpatriotic' and thrown away. To be honest, I am glad that China is developing into a new research/technology center. They have started to contest and challenge already implemented protocols/standards in America and Europe, and to that end I commend them. We shouldn't just write them off because they are "evil" because, folks, AMERICA also has its share of corruption. Modern-day capitalistic China is beginning to grow, and these new product lines and recent announcements are only the beginning of it.
The news story reads:
A Chinese company based in Shanghai named "E28" has quietly been selling Linux-based smartphones in China since August,...
So, how is this "China", the country launching a product? It's a company doing the launch, and quietly at that. When Cisco releases a new product, do we say "The United States Launches..."?
I suppose slashdot editors see product lines as the new arms race, where products created in a market are attributed to the country as a whole.
"dual ARM9s..."
... does that mean the kernel is SMP? Do the ARM9s support it natively, making the kernel think it's only one processor?
So, someone tell me
Does uCLinux support SMP? (Next on the SMP docket: UserModeLinux... whee!)
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.
Note the edges of the screen people, how did the display become so square, while the screen itself isn't? Even more blatant, why should the phone have an oval outerlid that would, apparently, only shows a grey box-like icon?
Something's not quite right here, methinks.
More than mere navel gazing.
Maybe you just need to stop being so cynical. Tonight I've been reading (for homework) papers on AIDS clinical trials. These are on the incredible advances in HIV fighting methods since the 1980's. Where was this research conducted? The USA. Who published these papers? The New England Journal of Medicine. What company made the wonderdrugs to increase AIDS survival so drastically. GlaxoSmithKline, a USA company. Now that's just what I did tonight, an incredibly small portion of all the cool R and D going on in this country. It seems to me the US is still a pretty decent place to live, but I suppose since China is putting Linux on a phone that it's on the 'path of improvement'. Now I'm not blindly cheerleading for the USA, but really, open your eyes. There are tons of opportunities for you in this country, why don't you use some of them?
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.
Why is it that every time a Chinese company does something the slashdot article begins with "China does Blah-blah-blah... plop."
You know, there are over a billion people in China. I'm sure many of them even have some small ammount of autonomy from the evil borg communist collective that americans seem to think dominates them all. Is this just simple racism or is it some kind of fear complex?
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.
US doesn't manufacture the phone?!? The #2 handset manufacturers in the world is called Motorola and it is an US company!!! Motorola has been #1 handset vendor in China for the past 10 years and it was passed by Bird this year.
Most Chinese phone vendors still rely much on the Western companies including Motorola to provide components and software for phone. Motorola has been doing good business on this.
The launch of E2800 by E28 is a threat to Motorola because it will potential cut into a big software/components market now dominated by Motorola!.
Japan makes most cellphones for domestic use and the launch of Chinese phones have no impact on the Japanese vendors!