Linux Headed For Smartphone Domination?

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices has published a summary of research findings from Zelos Group that predicts that Linux is going dominate the smartphone market, beating out both Symbian and Microsoft. Zelos says that Linux scored highest on the two criteria that matter most to OEMs and carriers: openness and low cost. Microsoft scored lowest in these criteria. The article says Zelos believes Symbian beats Microsoft due to the flexibility of its licensing terms, and Microsoft prospects will be stymied to an extent by its desire to strictly manage how its brand is used. The conclusion: Linux will be the preferred operating system for connected devices."

Comments

"They" already have Linux controlled radio's

[OriginalSpaceMan]

My wife was visiting a near by company (I can't say who) that has lots of hand-held an other types of radio powered by Linux. She said they seem to be very stable and easy to manage. Why not phones? The concept is already there...

you know what that means...

[jaden]

SCO files suit today against Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, Cingular, Nextel, Audiovox, Handspring, Hitachi, Kyocera, LG, Motorola, NEC, Neonode, Nokia, Panasonic, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, VTech...

Asked for a comment, SCO was quoted as saying "There's gotta be some blood in one of these stones."

I dunno..

[grub]

The cost of a smartphone is high enough without having to add a $699 licensing fee payable to SCO..

Re:I dunno..

[RoLi]

Maybe I'm not as easily entertained as the average Slashdot moderator, but I really don't understand why the same old jokes get modded up to 4 or 5 "funny" for months or even years.

2002: Post "In Soviet Russia" joke - +5 Funny guaranteed
2003: Post "I for one welcome.." joke - +5 Funny guaranteed
And now the SCO-699$ licensing jokes... in every thread even remotely related to Linux. Maybe even several times...

-1 Redundant, please guys.

Potential Bias

[Interruach]

We all point out how such studies are biased when Microsoft release them...
Surely there's a chance that LinuxDevices has a bit of an interest in this?

Re:Potential Bias

[Bill Kendrick]

Surely there's a chance that LinuxDevices has a bit of an interest in this?

Looks like you didn't read carefully :^) LinuxDevices didn't do the study or release the report. They just wrote about it, just like Wired or CNN or Slashdot would...

any day now

[Anonymous Coward]

So with this phone, I get to grep for the girl's number I got last night, with Windows I get to grope the girl I met last night. Which one wins?

Tech history 101

[rockclimber]

the best system does NOT alway win in the market.

the domination of a market depends on marketing, lobbying, cash and quality of the product.
so, linux has 1 out of 4. not bad, but still a long way to go

Re:Tech history 101

[RoLi]

If you compare Symbian, Linux and Microsoft:

Symbian - pros

• Large user base
• already established on the market
• large software library (but mostly via Java)

cons

• Licensing costs
• Couldn't really lock the market because most development is done in Java, not natively in Symbian

Linux pros

• Easily developed on PC
• Easily modified
• More secure because the codebase has been tested on the Internet in production environments for years
• A big software library (through Java) and a even bigger library on the PC that can maybe be modified to run on the smartphone (depending of course on the application
• No license costs and also no license hassles. What many Winlots forget is that one of the big advantages of Linux is that you can start right away you don't have to buy and wait for development kits/licenses.
• Linux is already used in the majority of embedded-systems projects that use an OS. Since many cellphone-makers also make embedded systems, standardizing on Linux could offer benefits.

cons

• Relatively new on the market.

Microsoft - pros

• It's from Microsoft, so it gets loads of gratious advertising, marketing and hype from everybody including Slashdot

cons

• Since Microsoft's stance toward Java is very uncertain and doubtful, you have pretty much no native applications at all
• Microsoft's Java (aka .NET) hasn't been established on the market at all, there aren't many applications on the market. And the few that have been written are for the most part web-driven database frontends, not really anything that could be useful on a cellphone.
• Currently all cellphones running with Windows/Stinger/whateveritscalledtoday have either been shut down before market introduction because of quality problems or haven't sold very well because of quality problems
• Because of the general weakness of Microsoft cellphones, Microsoft is likely to discontinue them in a couple of years, just like Windows/Alpha, Hailstorm, the HomeR project and many many other Microsoft projects. We are not talking about IBM which supports their products virtually forever. Microsoft has shown many times that they don't care when their customers are stranded on an unsupported platform

To sum up, the outlook for Linux looks very bright. Because most advanced cellphone apps are Java-apps and not Symbian-apps, Linux will be able to replace Symbian cellphones without much problems. Even if that weren't the case, the smartphone market is still young and small, Linux also could prosper without Java-compatibility.

Advice for SCO...

[Faust7]

Asked for a comment, SCO was quoted as saying "There's gotta be some blood in one of these stones."

If you squeeze a stone hard enough, you'll break your hand.

Flexibility

[xot]

I think the flexibility that Linux provides to the manufacturers is the key factor in its being the OS of choice. Any OS that the hardware makers can use to their advantage to make the product more robust n fast will definitely be ahead in the race.Seriously doubt an Microsoft OS will give that kind of flexibility or 'openness'.

Another reason for the husband to nag

[MrsPReDiToR]

Thanks! After drooling over his friend's smart phone that runs the 'evil' mircrosoft my husband now has an excuse to have a lovely linux smartphone top of his (insert occasion here) present list. Like he needed an excuse to bend my ears about how great Linux is!

Uh right

[NanoGator]

"Zelos says that Linux scored highest on the two criteria that matter most to OEMs and carriers: openness and low cost. Microsoft scored lowest in these criteria. The article says Zelos believes Symbian beats Microsoft due to the flexibility of its licensing terms, and Microsoft prospects will be stymied to an extent by its desire to strictly manage how its brand is used. The concusion: Linux will be the preferred operating system for connected devices."

I think what this person fails to understand is that the preferred OS is dictated by what customers spend their money on, not by the cost or the openness. That's not to say that Microsoft will win. But you all should remember that Microsoft is the least open and most expensive desktop OS out there, and it's well ahead of everybody else on the desktop.

Re:Uh right

[soft_guy]

That happened in a totally different context. So much so, that the fact that MS currently has 90+% of the desktop market doesn't matter *at all* in the context of smart phones.

For one thing, the maker of the phone puts both the OS and the apps on the phone. The user probably doesn't even know what OS the phone is running - or care. The phone maker is going to go with the smallest costs. That includes all costs, not just the license cost. Fortunately, Linux is not harder or more expensive to develop for than Windows CE. So, Linux has a good shot at being picked for any given implementation.

It's all about the size.

[cduffy]

I happen to know some very skilled embedded systems developers, and at least one (also a Linux kernel maintainer) recently lost a possible contract with a very large multinational company because Linux turned out to be too large for the environment they wanted to run it in.

Hopefully VSTa or a like open operating system better suited to very small environments (eCos? dunno) will become practical and popular for such usage. Linux is reasonable in larger embedded systems -- networking hardware and the like -- but its suitability becomes less and less as space constraints constrict (think 100K of RAM or less). Remember, it's not just the cost of the OS that's an issue -- the cost of the extra hardware to run it, and the loss of battery life, is also a dealbreaker.

So no, I'm not convinced by this report; the summary makes it look too much like something concocted by talking to managers with insufficient engineering input.

Re:It's all about the size.

[kroyd]

Well, integrated chips such as the Samsung SIP (System-in-Package) is 17x17x1.4mm, in that space you get 256mbit of SDRAM and 256mbit of flash RAM and a 203Mhz ARM CPU.. And even that is on the very low end when you look at what future smartphones will require. Some info on SIP.

I believe the majority of new smartphones introduced this year will have a 2mp or more camera, 240x320 or better resolution, of course a reasonably capable TCP/IP stack for playing online games, 3D accelration, etc.. 100K of ram is not enough, and it hasn't been enough for years. (100K of RAM is about what you have in a modern low end Nokia phone sold in Europe, and that is clearly not a smartphone.)

So, it all comes down to which OS has the most features for the lowest price, and which fits on a computer that would have been considered high-end in the early '90s. If you start from scratch and plan to sell millions of your product, which you have to do to get a reasonable margin, using Linux is a rather obvious choice imho.

Motorola Linux Phone

[Bill Kendrick]

Article over at LinuxDevices.com: "Motorola has launched its first embedded Linux/Java smartphone, the much-anticipated A760, in the Asian market."

More research facts

[prostoalex]

Just last year, there were 3 million smartphones sold

Symbian owned two-thirds of the market, Microsoft - 14%, Palm - 13%

HP is becoming the biggest name in the industry with 33% market share globally, but Nokia has 78% in Europe, Middle East and Asia.

Well....

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, right now, the market is pretty much dominated by Symbian - at least it is here in the UK, the three main phones running it being the Nokia 7650, and Sony Ericsson P800 and P900. O2 and Orange both have PocketPC and Windows Smartphones.

How Linux fits into this is kinda interesting. For a start, there aren't (m)any smartphones on the market that use it yet (there are actually more Windows Smartphone models out there). Secondly, in the smartphone market, it will be the second generation of smartphones - the ones that appeal to people who buy for ringtones and interchangeable covers - that will drive the market, and I don't really see smartphones being that mainstream.

To put it simply, the smartphone market - and it's user's needs and requirements - are incredibly fragmented. It's an area like cars and stereos; market saturation is so great that I don't think any specific OS will 'win out'.

There will be many winners. For corporations needing .NET stuff on phones, it'll be MS, for mainstream, maybe Linux (but what flavor?), and for your PDA-stylee smartphone lover, probably Symbian or something similar. Either way, one mans smartphone capabilities is another mans excessive baggage...

Re:Well....

[jodonoghue]

I'm working on porting a real cellular protocol stack to Windows Smartphone as we speak.

Despite being no fan of Microsoft desktop products, I have to say that in many respects, Smartphone is a very well thought out product. They have a slick, and very well designed UI, a decent set of apps, and a kernel which is relatively easy to get to work on a new platform.

I agree with the poster who complains about the MS build system (dreadful), but it does the job, but the kernel itself really does have some good things going for it.

Symbian is a great operating system platform, but porting an existing protocol stack (written, as they nearly all are, in plain old C) to Symbian with its 'C++ from the ground up goodness' (polymorphic device drivers, anyone?) is an enormous task - there are something like 10,000 source files in the system I'm dealing with, and the thought of doing a Symbian port is, frankly, terrifying.

The other (non-technical) problem is that Symbian seems to be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by becoming increasingly dominated by Nokia (which is great if you're Nokia, not so good if you're anyone else). If the platform had remained true to its original promise of being a real consortium, it would probably have a much more successful future ahead.

Linux is a great option at the low end, but there is no decent smartphone UI (QTopia is more aimed at pen controlled devices), so you'd have to roll your own, which takes away from the standardisation aspect of having a 'real' OS. FreeBSD is even better, to be honest because (I wish it weren't so, but this is business reality) corporates are often scared of the GPL.

In any event, the way thing look in Europe, all any smartphone really has to do is be a decent platform for Java - operators aren't interested in supporting multiple platforms, and Java already has some traction. SavaJe seems, from what I can tell, to be basically that, but you could certainly roll a similar UI in Java for an embedded Linux kernel and have a great solution.

As the main story points out, this is a very price sensitive market. Symbian and MS Smartphone basically cost about the same, and enough to make a free platform highly attractive. It's the lack of a suitable, standardised, UI which causes the problem.

The OS is one of the smallest pieces of the puzzle

[John_McKee]

Yes, Linux is open, and it is free, but there aren't any distributions designed for cellphones that are open and free. When you license Sybian or Windows for Smartphone, you get EVERYTHING. You get a reference design for the hardware, a GUI, interfaces for common chipsets, LCD drivers specific for cellphones, etc, etc. Yes, I am aware that Motorola has released a Linux smartphone, but all of the important stuff is still closed source. When you use Linux you get an OS. That's it. A Company has to decide if building the rest from scratch is less than just licensing an OS that already finished the hard stuff. I am betting it often won't be.

Viability???

[Tarwn]

I find it very odd that "openness" and "cost"" were valued over business viability. I'm not questioning the decision (yet), but it looks odd to me that all points in the article lead to Linux. In my mind I always believed OEMs were after business viability first (they can always overcharge later).

Re:Did anyone else NOT see this coming?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Linux is still a long way off dominating embedded, dpeending of course on what you mean by embedded. Most embedded designs still use inhouse RTOSs or no RTOS at all and most run on CPUs not supported by Linux or even uCLinux (the MMU-less version of Linux).

I think Linux is a long way off dominating the desktop, mainly because Linux systems are relatively difficult to work with (eg. installing a hardware driver for a camera etc is beyond the capability of Joe Sixpack). This is not a problem in more restrictive systems (eg. servers and embedded systems) where Joe Sixpack does not have to fiddle.

Embedding Linux is way easier and more productive than, say, Windows CE. I do development for both and after doing some Linux stuff, WinCE work is just so depressing.

Compare: change 1 line of kernel code and get running.

Linux: 9 seconds compile etc to build a new kernel image. 6 seconds ethernet download and boot. 15 seconds total.

WinCE: Build 10+ **minutes** to do a full build because the partial build does not work reliably. 3 **minutes** to ethernet download/boot.

Class: who's going to get more work done in a day?

Not anytime soon!

[Atomic Frog]

Those guys at Zelos don't know the market then.

- Openness is desirable, but guess what, Symbian is essentially "open" to the phone developers. Linux has no advantage there.
- Low cost. Yes, developers want low cost, but here's where the Zelos guys miss the boat. Low cost means the TOTAL, OVERALL cost, including missing market opportunities from slower time-to-market.
Ask LG and others why they licensed bits of their software from Nokia.

What costs you is the time to develop the product, NOT per device licensing costs. This is NOT a personal computer market where the OS license cost can make up a large percentage of the cost.

Symbian works, it's good enough, it's from a consortium of the mobile phone makers, so it's relatively open and has easy licensing costs. Add to that the base of existing developers, it's hard to see how Linux will crack the market unless some extra whizz-bang functionality is added on the phones that Symbian can't support.

Plus, almost no user cares what OS their phone runs.

I had a chat with one of the prod. development managers from Nokia. He doesn't like the Windows-based products for mobile phones, but it _isn't_ for the reasons the Linux zealots expect. It isn't cost, and he didn't even mention "closed-source".

Palm OS?

[Rufus211]

What about palm for smartphones? As a longtime user of the Kyocera 6035 who recently upgraded to a Treo 600 I've fallen in love with the palm-based smart phones. I've looked at some windows ones and they just have *too* much functionality so that it all gets confused and horribly complicated. I haven't looked much at Symbian based ones but they didn't seem to have as many features and certainly not the broad application base either Palm or Windows have. As far as Linux are there any smartphones out there based on it?

That's great and all but...

[DarkHelmet]

But will my phone have apt-get or up2date on it? :)

Well overly optimistic....

[JollyFinn]

Nokia is practicly dominating the market, and other top players too go for symbian... This results that there will be large global pool for symbian applications soon... Another point is that number 1 mobile phone manufacturer (NOKIA) has stake in symbian so, they won't give up on it for linux. So atleast europe, asia and middle-east will go for symbian, instead of something else...

Palm OS?

[isaac]

What about Palm OS? Every single person I know with a "smart phone" has a Treo (mostly 600s, though I know a couple of early adopters with 180s and 300s).

Maybe I'm misconstruing the definition of a "smart phone" - my Motorola i90 has a (useless) Java VM and some (crapulent) PIM apps like a datebook and memo pad. Does that make it a "smart phone"? If so, color me unimpressed. It's totally useless, as far as I can tell, and can't replace my Tungsten E.

-Isaac

what a ludicrous question...

[torpor]

linux is headed for ____ domination. no seriously. i don't see the linux kernel, and its toolsets, and its entourage of libs, and its knowledge-pool, stopping any time soon. look how far it has come in 10 years. where will it be in 5?

if there is one lesson to learn, it is that the power of people is unstoppable. it is a humble kind of peace indeed, two random computer geeks at different corners of the globe working on 'scratching an itch' together, but it is peace.

so, linux on ____ device is pretty much irrelevant as a question, the question is "where won't linux be getting its huge?", but then ... the answer to that question isn't so fun to fantasize about, alas ...