Nokia Takes Control of Symbian

jpatokal writes "CNN reports: Nokia has bought out Psion's share of Symbian, pushing its stake in the mobile phone OS to a dominant 63%. This means rivals like Siemens and Samsung may now pretty much be forced to choose between proprietary Nokia or Microsoft technology. Symbian may be the more open of the two, but GPL it ain't - does Linux now have an edge?" We reported on a rumor to this effect late last year.

Comments

Open != effectiveness

[NecoX]

Why does GPL have anything to do with how good an OS can/could be? Jeebus...

Re:Open != effectiveness

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here....

Re:Open != effectiveness

[Chairboy]

Sadly, interest in things being open source is transitioning (my cynical colleagues might say it already has) from being about controlling quality and maintaining code that a corporation might 'sunset' to being more about religion.

Many of todays open source advocates seem to have lost touch with the reasons they originally became attached to the concept. This can only hurt the future success of these projects as more and more people associate this with zealotry instead of technical excellence.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[n()_cHIEFz]

I agree, PalmOS is superior in the handheld market and it's proprietary. OS X is another expample, not everything is open.

I think the point, us nerds would like to be able to hack our phones like we hack on our computer systems. One could do some interesting things with an open phone OS...

Re:Open != effectiveness

[Ami Ganguli]

Um, the idea of controlling quality and maintaining old code isn't what Open Source or Free Software have traditionally been about at all.

The original drivers were:

• The desire to share code (and with GPL-style licenses, the desire to have others return the favour by sharing back)
• "Free as in Freedom"
• Not getting locked-in to proprietary companies
• Doing something useful with software you would have written anyway, but don't want to commercialize

I'm sure there are more, but controlling quality and maintaining abandonware have never been very high on my list and I'm surprised you think they were ever what Open Source was about.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[Manip]

GPL != OpenSource either, things can be open without being GPL. GPL != Freedom.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[Anonymous Coward]

Free software means you don't have to ever worry about any of the myriad problems associated with proprietary software licenses.

Can you think of any reason why a piece of software should *NOT* be free? (from the user's point of view .. obviously the software author has a more difficult to decision to make).

I can't see what's wrong with simply expressing a desire for all software to be free. It's like having a desire for all food to not cause cancer, or something. Maybe you can make an exception for certain foods that you don't eat much of (sacchrine [sp] maybe?), but the "default" is wanting software to be free.

The GPL/BSD/similar licenses are like a "good housekeeping seal" .. you don't have to sit and write a thoughtful essay on *why* you want to software to be free, it's just a safe bet that our lives will be a lot easier if it is.

So, keep demanding free software, don't worry about being called a zealot.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[October_30th]

Can you think of any reason why a piece of software should *NOT* be free (from the user's point of view)

If I don't pay for it, I have absolutely no right to expect support.

Furthermore, if I pay for software, I know I've contributed to the common economy: I'm keeping someone employed.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[Short Circuit]

So that's you're reason. And that's the reason of a lot of developers out there.

But it's not the reason you use if you want commercial backing of any open source projects, and it's not the (main) reason I use Linux exclusively.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[jc42]

think the point, us nerds would like to be able to hack our phones like we hack on our computer systems.

Close, but I'd express it differently.

I don't really want to hack my phone. I want to replace it. What I want to replace it with is a PDA-like gadget that will fit into my pocket, and be able to talk to both the phone system and the wireless Internet. And I want to be able to use it like a computer, i.e., it must be programmable.

An important part of this is the "will fit into my pocket" phrase. Most PDAs flunk this test.

I have in my pocket what looked like a good start a couple of years ago: a Kyocera 6035 "smartphone". It has a lot of problems, though. One is that the web browser works over IP that's PPP over the phone system. It's sloooooow, and you get charged full air time for the connection, even when no packets are being passed. This is far too expensive to use it routinely.

My wife has a new Tungsten, that comes with wi-fi networking built in. But it doesn't do phone calls. And it's too big for my pocket (though it does fit into her purse).

Also, these are both PalmOS. After a couple of years of exploring their development stuff, I find that it's really not worth the effort. Doing even the smallest thing takes forever, because you just can't debug the stuff. The slightest error freezes everything, you have to reboot, and you have no clues as to what went wrong. There's nothing at all like gdb available. And most of the internal working are invisible and undocumented to outsiders like me.

To be credible, I'd want something that I can actually program. This means that the innards should be documented, and there should be places to ask dumb questions. PalmOS doesn't even come close. I haven't tried Symbian, and I do wonder if it's better.

But it's pretty obvious that a pocket-sized linux gadget with both wi-fi and cell-phone hardware would do the job quite nicely. Nothing hidden there, and lots of places to ask dumb questions (and get RTFM answers, for which I can ask "So where's the FM for that?" ;-)

I'm not dogmatic about linux, though. FreeBSD would be nice, too, and OSX would be pretty good (though parts of its innards are blocked by brick walls).

I also wonder about iTron. Is there any way for a US resident (with little Japanese) to get meaningful experience with it?

Re:Open != effectiveness

[shaitand]

Those aren't just his reasons, those are the reasons the open source movement came into existance to begin with. The reasons individuals have for following may differ but the reason for the movement itself does not.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, did you seriously not realize you were being trolled? Nice response, though.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[poot_rootbeer]

Um, the idea of controlling quality and maintaining old code isn't what Open Source or Free Software have traditionally been about at all.

Perhaps they should be/should have been.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[Ben Hutchings]

Most parts of SymbianOS can work as a layer over Windows (the "WINS" build), which allows you to do most of your development and debugging on a PC using a special version of CodeWarrior. (Previously Symbian supported Visual C++; I don't know whether they still do.) Of course the real thing works a bit differently; for example, it runs applications in separate processes with memory protection.

In some ways it should be easier to debug for PalmOS since you can just run the app in POSE and attach gdb to it.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[Anonymous Coward]

> Not getting locked-in to proprietary companies
= maintaining abandonware

> Doing something useful with software you would have written anyway
= controlling quality

Read your own post... while those aren't quite the same things, they're ways and parts of accomplishing those original goals.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[leifm]

Why does it matter if Linux on phones has an edge. More than likely even if a given phone is using Linux everything on top of it will be propriety anyway. Seems to me that as long as phone x can communicate with phone y using whatever standards I don't give a crap what low level code it's running and what license that code is under.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[Short Circuit]

I didn't say anything to contradict the reasons the movement came to be. I'm simply pointing out that, as far as corporations and other bodies with financial interests are concerned, those aren't the primary direct benefits.

In fact, having a religious OSS developer in-house could be considered a risk; they might walk out on principle.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[bcombee]

Huh?

Also, these are both PalmOS. After a couple of years of exploring their development stuff, I find that it's really not worth the effort. Doing even the smallest thing takes forever, because you just can't debug the stuff. The slightest error freezes everything, you have to reboot, and you have no clues as to what went wrong. There's nothing at all like gdb available. And most of the internal working are invisible and undocumented to outsiders like me.

What do you mean? gdb is available on Palm OS as part of the prc-tools package, and there are also credible debuggers from Metrowerks and PalmSource. True, it is difficult to develop ON the device, but hosted development environments running on the desktop are effective and work well for developing software for that OS. Remember, Palm OS IS an embedded system. You've got to think like an embedded developer to make effective use of it.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[Milican]

Sorry to be an arse, but what an iTroll post. You want either Linux, FreeBSD or OSX on your cell phone / PDA? Seriously, what benefit would an OSX kernel give you on a cell phone. You just mentioned it because it made you sound cool. Any other Slashdot approved OSes? How about BeOS... you forgot to mention that one... oh wait... from what I have heard the Be developers have put alot of their tech into Palm OS 6.

As mentioned on other subthreads Palm OS does have debugging available through cross compilers. Thats how you debug this kinda stuff. Palm OS also has debugging ROMS for almost every make and model in many different languages. Other Palm PDA vendors do the same. In addition, the functions for every version of Palm OS are all documented in a PDF file called Palm OS Companion (there are other PDFs too). Some documentation is lacking and there are gotchas. You would know this if you programmed for Palm...

JOhn

Re:Open != effectiveness

[Anonymous Coward]

That's so nutty... and it misses the point. If software is under a free license, you can easily pay for it *voluntarily* (like I did when I bought my FreeBSD CDs), but you can't opt-out of paying for proprietary software.

What if I want to pay specifically for the *support* and not the *software*?

What if I'm just not as charitable as you apparently are? (But I am, I just never pay for proprietary sofware, only Free software).

There's only one group of people that believes in paying for software as way of "supporting programmers": other programmers who haven't moved to an open-source model!

Re:Open != effectiveness

[KarmaMB84]

And the constant "So many people see the code and fix it!" argument gives people the impression that it is what OSS is about.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[twalk]

The fact that this post got +5 Informative goes to show that the moderators really are on crack, and that many /.ers really don't know much about PalmOS development, but like to spout off their incorrect ideas anyway.

GCC, GDB, and Pilrc (resource compiler) have been availible for a long time. POSE (Palm OS Emulator) is also completely open source and maintained by PalmSource. Right there is a complete open source dev environment.

OS documentation is pretty complete, up to and including info on many of the internal data structures. There's also several easy to access newsgroups, faqs, books, etc, with tons of info for doing practically anything you could imagine.

Really, after doing some side programming on the Palm for 3+ years, I've never seen anyone who's had as much trouble as this guy's said he had. Heck, I've got a better dev enviroment, docs, etc, for Palm, than the solaris & linux systems that I use at my full time job.

PS, PalmSource is now working on a fully integrated & free Eclipse dev environment...

Re:Open != effectiveness

[thirdrock]

Really, after doing some side programming on the Palm for 3+ years, I've never seen anyone who's had as much trouble as this guy's said he had. Heck, I've got a better dev enviroment, docs, etc, for Palm, than the solaris & linux systems that I use at my full time job.

Do you still have to join (sorry APPLY to join) their shitty developer programme. Or can you download and code now?

Re:Open != effectiveness

[twalk]

You always could just download all of the PRC tools (gcc, gdb, pilrc, etc) and do debugging from the device without having to join. You basically just need to join if you want the roms (for POSE), the simulator (PalmOS 5), or to join their newsgroups. Joining is free, so it's not really that big of deal. (That's unless you work for a company, then you probably have to go through the lawyers for the license agreement part.) It's been so long since I've needed to get anything from there, that I can't even remember my login and password anymore.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[moosesocks]

That's really funny. You could say just about the same things when comparing American Democracy with COMMUNISM.

The fact is, openness in itself does not make something better. I could go on and make a long list of communist governments which failed, but I'm not going to.... as there have been no successes.

The orignal drivers of Communism:
----Everybody shares work. Every man does his equal part and gives back to the motherland.
----Freedom from oppressive governments. Let the people rule. (As you know, this has never been the case, and was probably the biggest point of failure of communism)
----Not being locked into a proprietary government :) . It's sort of funny how we slashdot is defining proprietary these days. If 95% of people use something, it's not really proprietary, is it? And plus, linux is quite proprietary in itself. Linux runs windows programs much better than windows runs linux apps using Qt, GTK, and the likes.
----"Doing something useful with software you would have written anyway, but don't want to commercialize." You have neatly summed communism up in a single sentence. I congratulate you.
-----It's not like we can forcibly remove RMS or Linus if we don't like them or they're doing a bad job, though, the theory behind their philosophy says we should be able to. *cough... Stalin... cough*

Am I saying that open-source is communist? No. I'm not going to pass any judgement on it. But the community is portraying it as such, and seem to have some sort of false illusions about it without really having proof (just like the way in which virtually every country who had a communist revolution acted before the revolution, followed quickly by a chatostrophic depression. go read "House of the Spirits" by Isabel Allende if you don't get what I'm saying)

Face it, everybody needs some sort of standard or a strong leader who admits he is such. Proprietary doesn't mean bad. Open doesn't necessarily mean good. (Open USUALLY IS good, but good is not necessarily open).

What it comes down to in the end is that if something does something well at a low cost (cost is not always releated to money) , it is good. For example, AFAIK, Symbian OS does its job really well at the expense of money and a small loss of freedom. On the other hand, Linux doesn't do as good of a job with regard to mobile phones, but is free, and allows more freedom. To the phone makers, the balance of costs and benefits seen in Symbian makes it a better product.

Re:Open != effectiveness

[Ozwald]

I dunno. I see advantages of all platforms and their OS's. Like Rim does battery life and wireless the best (nobody else can stay securely connected to an internal network for a week without recharging). WinCE + Clones appear to have the best support for new peripherals and has a powerful API (is multithread unlike Palm).

I do have a wish (listening Nokia?). Take a relatively small phone, doesn't have to be the size of Bic lighter, just reasonable. Add WiFi and VoIP so that it can access Internet and voice to bypass Telcos when at home or office (or coffee shop). Have the Internet functionality always on.

And don't say this is possible, everything I ask for has been done. Just nobody has put this into one device yet.

Ozwald

Re:Open != effectiveness

[kubrick]

If 95% of people use something, it's not really proprietary, is it?

That depends how many of them paid a single person or organisation (the "proprietor") for the use of it. I'd argue "yes", whether or not the source is open, if they retain effective control over it and can stop others using it at a whim.

Face it, everybody needs some sort of standard or a strong leader who admits he is such.

Why can't the standards be agreed by community effort? The Internet has worked well in that fashion for a while (too many competing "strong leaders" to really agree in any other fashion than a consensus).

As to the second part of that statement, the central fascist fallacy is that such regimes rarely produce good follow-up material. Indeed, the original strong leader tends becomes autocratic and starts to repress others -- mainly the people they see might be able to replace them. (Even Singapore, which is a wet dream for the econo-fascists out there, has never really had any freedom of speech, or effective political opposition.)

By the way, open source software shares some similarities with communism*; it's interesting to see the various responses of people when scarcity is no longer a factor. The greedy introduce an artificial scarcity and attempt to profit from it, while the generous give and take in (hopefully) somewhat equal measure.

* (I'm using the word communism in the dry political Marxist abstract here, not in the "totalitarian socialist states calling ourselves communists" style of Russia, pre-1990s China, etc)

Re:Open != effectiveness

[Sri Lumpa]

"Um, the idea of controlling quality and maintaining old code isn't what Open Source or Free Software have traditionally been about at all."

They aren't the direct causes but they are ancilry causes.

Free Software as a political/philosophical movement (that is, since RMS started GNU as opposed to the way it existed before that without people realising what it was) is about freedom to modify and redistribute the code. and freedom from having one company/person dictate what you can and cannot do with the software (like with the NDA RMS would have had to sign to be able to see the source of the printer driver).

However, the freedom to modify the software and to redistribute it, which are THE primary reasons behind free software, implies the idea for controlling quality given that you seldom modify software to degrade its quality (product activation, spyware... notwithstanding but these are found in proprietary software as there is no incentive to include them in free software) but modify it to remove bugs or add features which improve free software. So controlling quality is one of the things that free software about, just something that is subsumed as one of the reasons we want freedom to modify the software.

As for maintaining old code (or at least the possibility of doing so), it is similarly part of free software as one of the reasons for the need to be able to modify the source as some people may need to keep odl system runing. For example, many COBOL programs have been in use for decades, only being modified enough to get them running on new mainframes. Do you think it is easier to port them with or without the source?

As for Open Source as a political/marketing movement (as started by ESR and Bruce Perens around 1997) controlling quality is THE idea behind it as Open Source was founded as a way to sway companies to Free Software by using a more business friendly name, toning down the Freedom rethoric and using an "OSS leads to better quality" argumentation.

So I would say "controlling quality and maintaining old code" is part of what Free Software and Open Source have always been about as your software cannot meet the respective definitions of these movements without allowing it and these are qualities scarcely found outside these movements.

Gaming

[lake2112]

Oh thats great ... 63% of cell phones will now by N-Gage'd!!!

Re:Gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea...do you even pay attention or just post without thinking? There are a ton of phones running the Symbian OS (as the NGage is one of them) and the only difference between the NGage version (other than phone version specific stuff) and the other phones is that the OS has had coded into it to work with cards that you can't copy verry eaisily hence the ability to play the NGage games on a couple of the Siemen's phones that run the same Symbian version (with a little working around the NGage's anti-copy junk of course to get the games off thier respective cards).

Re:Taking control of simian?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read at as Sybian.

Perhaps they're going to revamp the vibrator function of their cellphones afterall?!

The Enemy?

[slutdot]

So does this make Nokia the enemy now?

Re:The Enemy?

[garcia]

no, it just makes me that much more interested in buying a competing phone. Oh wait, I don't care about cell phones, carry on.

Re:The Enemy?

[gl4ss]

well, dunno about that but hopefully it means that nokia will be keeping it's symbian platforms going on for a while, and preferably standardised well enough that programs work over generations of phones so that there will be plenty of stuff available(6600 which is series60 v2 runs most of well thought series60 v1 stuff ok, sx1 from siemens seems to run everything ok as well.)..

a shameless plug, http://kotiluola.net/~glass/visul.sis
asteroids clone with 3d rendered graphics for symbian series60 phones (6600,n-gage, 3650, 3660, 7650, sx1).

and another shameless plug in finnish:
Ja kellaan tampereen alueelta koodiorjan paikkaa symbianii vaantaan teekkarille?

Re:The Enemy?

[bojanb]

While Nokia does own the largest market share of mobile phones (around 50%, while the best next competitor has 15% or something), they have never so far engaged in anything similar to strong-arm, no-prisoners tactics of a Redmond corporation we all know and love. In fact, they have pushed for adoptions of open (as in "not Nokia's") standards; Java Mobile Edition being the latest example. With 50% of the market they could have pushed for some custom, lock-in solution but they didn't.

I think Nokia's track record has been OK so far. In my book it stands among the "likeable" corporations, like Toyota and Canon. It'll be interesting to see if they will be able to resist the temptation with Symbian though.

Re:The Enemy?

[OuD]

I think Nokia's track record has been OK so far. In my book it stands among the "likeable" corporations, like Toyota and Canon.

Yes, because in Finland we have this thing called "reilu meininki".

Symbian isn't only incrementally more open...

[tverbeek]

Their software is also generally superior to Microsoft's, and more mature. SymbianOS (and its predecessors) was engineered from Day One back in the late 80's to run without failure on highly constrained hardware. So if I were Samsung or Siemens, I'd still see little reason to switch to MS.

Re:Symbian isn't only incrementally more open...

[Anonymous Coward]

Their software is also generally superior to Microsoft's

<Waits For Facts To Support Claim>

Chirp...chirp

</Waits For Facts To Support Claim>

Re:Symbian isn't only incrementally more open...

[tverbeek]

I'm not here to do your research for you, kid. Look it up.

Re:Symbian isn't only incrementally more open...

[Anonymous Coward]

It only makes you look like an idiotic zealot.

Re:Symbian isn't only incrementally more open...

[Anonymous Coward]

pot. kettle. black.

Re:Symbian isn't only incrementally more open...

[Anonymous Coward]

other than youre putting money into the pockets of your competition....

Re:Symbian isn't only incrementally more open...

[Anonymous Coward]

As the proud owner of a Sony Ericsson P800, let me tell you that for all the good things about the phone, the OS crashes a lot!

Re:Symbian isn't only incrementally more open...

[cpeterso]

I code for WinCE and Symbian. I have a Nokia 3650 (Symbian OS 6) and 6600 (Symbian OS 7). The Symbian OS is FAR from bulletproof and has reproducible OS crashes. I have never had WinCE (PocketPC 2002, 2003, or Smartphone 2002) crash on me.

Plus the Symbian SDK and APIs use a peculiar dialect of C++ (with strange non-standard exception handling) that is incompatible with standard C++, making cross-platform code sharing difficult.

what about palm?

[way2trivial]

like kyocera 6035/7135?
don't they count at all?

Re:what about palm?

[Phekko]

if you look at market shares, they don't. Plain and ugly truth: market's pretty much dominated by Symbian and Bill is trying very, VERY hard to get his share, too. Doesn't look good for PalmOS

Re:what about palm?

[stratjakt]

I have one of those phones. It's absolute trash. I've had fatal exceptions crash the phone just from trying to answer it.

The simplest phone functions are counterintuitive, unless you have skinny, skinny fingers you pretty much need to take out the stylus to dial a number in the address book. Really nice, a quick dial feature that you need both hands to use.

As far as palms go, its just a wee bit more sluggish than the m515 I picked up used for 20 bucks. Borderline useless.

If this is the best Palm can do on a phone, it's nowhere near a contender.

What about Palm OS?

[Scyber]

Sure its still proprietary, but it is another option.

Re:What about Palm OS?

[lonesometrainer]

I don't know. Samsung, always known for their great phones, has delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed (yip, four times) their SGH-i500/505/530/550 (or how they might call it right now).

Some of these phone (besides handspring perhaps and one or two tests from kyocera) companies seem to be waiting for palm os 6 with pure multitasking capabilities.

*BUT* keep in mind: smartphones are mostly geek toys. Perhaps one (two? three?) percent market cap these days. Symbian covers a whole lot more.

And you'll be seing palm imho only in smrtphones...

Re:What about Palm OS?

[pavon]

I think this is just as likely as changing to PocketPC. Look at the alternatives:

Symbian: Mature, Lightweight, Proprietary - controlled by competitor.
PalmOS: Mature, Lightweight, Proprietary - controlled by neutral third party.
PocketPC: Mature, Heavyweight, Proprietary - controlled by neutral third party.
Linux: Immature, Heavyweight, entirely open

Re:What about Palm OS?

[Tough Love]

Symbian: Mature, Lightweight, Proprietary - controlled by competitor.
PalmOS: Mature, Lightweight, Proprietary - controlled by neutral third party.
PocketPC: Mature, Heavyweight, Proprietary - controlled by neutral third party.
Linux: Immature, Heavyweight, entirely open

Ecos: Mature, lightweight, entirely open

Re:What about Palm OS?

[pavon]

Ecos: Mature, lightweight, entirely open

Oh yeah, I forgot about that one. Does it have any sort of GUI library though? I didn't think it did. Qtiopia on eCos is immature, and would make the system as a whole heavyweight, although not so much as Linux.

Re:What about Palm OS?

[Kris_J]

Or Linux. Surely the off-the-shelf options for "smart" phones are: Symbian, Windows, PalmOS and Linux.

No, not yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

"...does Linux now have an edge?"

No, No, No, NO! This has been discussed so many times it is unbelievable. Linux on your handheld is for people who want to run X apps remotely, ssh into their routers/servers etc. It is NOT (yet) for folk who want to simply write e-mail, update a calendar, play games and synchronise with a windows machine. Sorry, but it just isn't ready for this market area yet. Every year we hear how "200x is year of the Linux desktop" and every year we get excuses, lack of support from big vendors and API change problems which make porting apps a nightmare.

What "Linux on a PDA" needs is backing from a big vendor with plenty of cash to back it up. The only way this is going to become a reality in a fast moving sector such as PDAs is to play in the big arena with the giants (Microsoft and Nokia).

Re:No, not yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been discussed so many times it is unbelievable. Linux on your handheld is for people who want to run X apps remotely, ssh into their routers/servers etc.

What an odd generalization for what is basically a KERNEL.

Look, if you're thinking that "handheld Linux" is "Sharp Zaurus", you're really limiting yourself. Like you say, all it takes is a big player to write the software.

Re:No, not yet.

[garcia]

Is Linux (running on a PDA meant to run Linux) more stable than one running PocketPC 2002? I have CONSTANT issues w/the device locking up hard and forcing a complete reset (losing everything that wasn't stored on the CF card -- many programs require at least pieces of themselves be installed on the main memory and not a storage card).

It's a big time hassle for me and I would love to switch if Linux had the stability on the PDAs that it does on the PC side.

Re:No, not yet.

[psykotedy]

I have a feeling that the backing thing might not be such a problem with IBM jumping on the Linux bandwagon (e.g., I haven't been able to watch a football game without that albino kid in the white room coming on at least once per game). So, I think, it's more relevant right now to think that Linux might be a viable solution...at last.

Re:No, not yet.

[interiot]

The Motorola A760 is based on linux, but that doesn't necessarily mean it runs X. It could just be using linux's memory management, file system, etc. code. I don't know how good of reviews it's getting, but I don't think you can really say that linux isn't ready.

Re:No, not yet.

[drinkypoo]

Linux is a kernel. There is a JDK available for linux. (Actually, aren't there three? Just on x86 though.) Many of the little apps on cell phones are now written in some form of Java.

Regardless, if you can get Linux to run on the device, there's no reason you can't write e-mail and calendar programs for a linux-based handheld or cellphone. You don't have to use X, either. There ARE other GUI options.

Re:No, not yet.

[ryanw]

What "Linux on a PDA" needs is backing from a big vendor with plenty of cash to back it up.

I'll say it once again. What linux needs is to drop the stupid GPL and go with a BSD license to allow a company to dump a bunch of money into their own tree of linux and gaurentee that they could make their investment dollars back. Otherwise, it will ALWAYS be stated how "Next year will be the Year LINUX will take over" .. The year will never arrive otherwise. It will always be several steps behind the competition.

Re:No, not yet.

[Ami Ganguli]

What "Linux on a PDA" needs is backing from a big vendor with plenty of cash to back it up.

Like Motorola perhaps?

I have no idea if Linux is better than Symbian for smart-phones, but it's clearly adequate, and technical issues aren't everything. Cost and politics play an important role. Phone vendors have seen what happened to the PC market and don't want to be owned by any software vendor - Microsoft or Nokia. Linux provides an alternative.

I'd be really surpised in Linux doesn't take at least a 10% of the smart-phone market over the next several years. Symbian will dominate for the forseeable future, MS and Palm will fight it out for second and third place, and Linux will slowly build a following among vendors who want to do something different.

Re:No, not yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please do not tell this to my Zaurus. It thinks it is a mature embedded linux with all the capabilities of these proprietary systems. I thought Sharp was a fairly large Vendor?

Re:No, not yet.

[GoofyBoy]

What model and what programs are you running on it?

I have a PocketPC 2002 and I install every program I can find and the most I've needed to do was a soft reset.

Re:No, not yet.

[gl4ss]

the problem with linux on mobile phones is that in the current state it looks like you get the plus sides (for normal guys) on the symbian phones(6600,p800,3650,n-gage,sx1), not on the upcoming linux phones.

I count a growing library of 3rd party independent developer software and free as in beer development tools that have access to most of the phones functions if so wished as those plus sides, currently it looks like you wont get that with motorolas or any others 'linux based' phone. they look like they're going to be just the usual locked down phone with few smartphone functions, in which case the fact that it runs linux couldn't intrest me less(hell, it would be a thing that was 'set to stone' so to speak so it wouldn't really matter what it was running as long as it ran).

what good is it that it runs linux if you CAN'T install any apps of your own that access the underlying hw? it makes no difference for me if it runs linux or not if you can't get any benefits from it and only progs you can run are sandboxed j2me programs.

though most people just care more about if it's cool looking and if they can do anything cool with it(what 3rd party progs do is that they make it cool.. also what easy 3rd party developing makes possible is the adaption into using them in different fields of work as tools for datagethering & etc)..

Re:No, not yet.

[fsmunoz]

What linux needs is to drop the stupid GPL and go with a BSD license to allow a company to dump a bunch of money into their own tree of linux and gaurentee that they could make their investment dollars back.

I fail to see any logic in this, for several reasons:

* The "stupid GPL" hasn't prevented companies from investing in Linux. This idea that "BSD-license is good for business" is contradicted by the number of companies investing and supporting Linux. The number of direct beneficts that users gain from Linux being GPL'ed should also be taken into account. An example: XFS and JFS can be used by any Linux user and directly improve their experience. This is contrary to the BSD's where most companies take * a lot * and give back very, very little.

* With your scenario exactly what would we gain from having a proprietary version of Linux running in a PDA? Once you allow proprietary forks much of the reaons for using a free OS disapear.

I have nothing against any of the BSD's or the BSD license. I use BSD AND BSD licensed programs. It's just that one should not assume that just because the BSD license allows proprietary forks this will somehow translate into the companies that take the code giving back as a "thank you". I'm sure there are companies that do this, but most of them just take without giving anything substancial back (or in direct proportions of their gains).

It is also understandable that companies prefer BSD code *for code that they didn't wrote*, since they can use them as they wish, but prefer GPL *for code that they made and are releasing under a free license*, since this prevents competitors from using the code without contributing back the changes and make them available to all.

cheers

Re:No, not yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Streets and Trips 2004 while having it hooked to a GPS.

Re:No, not yet.

[demachina]

Linux competing with Microsoft on the desktop is a whole different thing from Linux competing on devices. Microsoft has already won the desktop war so its a matter of defeating an entrenched monopoly which is really hard to do. They most definitely have not won anything in consumer electronics yet and Linux is still very much in the running so DON'T GIVE UP before the fights really even started.

Linux, especially running Qt.Embedded and Qtopia, is a great platform and gaining an OK application base thanks to Zaurus. Its most definitely a serious competitor in this arena though its probably a year or two out from becoming something that starts taking serious market share on phones. One down side is its a little heavy so it needs a little higher end hardware.

Asia already loves Linux. They are smart enough to realize that Microsoft is not someone you really want to partner with. If cell phones go the same route as PC's they realize Microsoft will be the only one that really wins, not the hardware manufacturers.

Nokia is a direct competitor to Siemens, Samsung and LG so its just a matter of time before Nokia uses their new absolute control of Symbian to give themselves an inside track technically or financially. Having now been burned by a competitor seizing a controlling stake in their software platform I imagine the true openness of Linux is looking real attrractive to them right now.

Linux is also a logical successor to TRON which is the OS Asian companies use overwhelmingly in consumer electronics now.

Re:No, not yet.

[javajoe99]

Try a hiptop sidekick if you want phone + ssh works for me, and there is an SDK for it, a j2me device

Re:No, not yet.

[Ami Ganguli]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think most of the phone software is developed using Java APIs that should be cross-platform (at least in theory).

But you're right, the fact that these phones run Linux/Symbian/Palm/MS is of no interest at all to the user. They're all locked down anyway.

Re:No, not yet.

[Dave2 Wickham]

Even if Linus wanted to change the kernel's licence, AFAIK he couldn't. Unless he stripped out everyone else's code, or got them to OK the licence (extremely hard - would Caldera cooperate in this case?), or got everyone to assign copyright to him, it would be breaking copyright law to release it under an incompatible licence.

Re:No, not yet.

[gl4ss]

j2me can be made to run pretty well on 'all' devices that support it if you don't rely on spesific apis.

however compared to native symbian it's very limited in power(both in _what_ you can do and access, and of course on how fast you can do it).. ..but j2me is also much easier to pick up and 'safe' to install without knowing that the program isn't malware.

Re:No, not yet.

[spitzak]

Of course it's so obvious that the GPL is the problem! That's why every single machine in the world runs BSD!

Re:No, not yet.

[spitzak]

You seem to be confused about what part of Linux is being ported.

The equivalent of your idea is for Microsoft's phone OS to be able to run an unmodified version of Microsoft Word. Though perhaps interesting to a few people, it should be pretty obvious that this is unnecessary and probably undesirable for a phone, and is not what Micorsoft is going to do. This does not mean that they cannot reuse great amounts of code they have written for Windows.

In the same way, a Linux phone that can run X might be interesting to a few people, but certainly not what everybody wants or needs. This does not mean that a great deal of Linux cannot be reused for this phone.

Psion

[BigBadBri]

Anyone know what Psion are going to do now?

Seems to me that now they're out of Symbian, they are a company w/out a product, since IIRC they announced that they were stopping making organisers a while back.

Re:Psion

[ElGuapoGolf]

Well, they do still make "industrial" portables, like the Netbook. Shame of that is, the Netbook now runs Windows Mobile (Windows CE, PocketPC, whatever it is now).

It really is a loss, as my Psion (Revo+) is still the best organiser I have ever used. I bought a Sharp Zaurus because I was suckered in by the Linux angle, but it couldn't hold a candle to the Revo. And nobody seems to be releasing any Symbian based organisers anymore, which makes Palm the default next best choice.

Re:Psion

[bhtooefr]

Their product is the Netbook Pro, a version of their Netbook legtop (bigger than a palmtop, smaller than a laptop) that runs WinCE.

Re:Psion

[ScottSpeaks!]

And nobody seems to be releasing any Symbian based organisers anymore

Your best bet for that would be a phone with organiser features included, like Nokia's 9190/9290. Or in case of a broken unit, leftover stock and used Revo/Makos on eBay.

I tried a PalmOS unit but was disappointed that the third-party spreadsheets available for it couldn't handle the things I was doing (collecting and analysing data) with Psion's Sheet app.

Oh, phew! I thought you meant Sybian!

[Amoeba Protozoa]

Funny, when I first read the posting I had an image of women on their new humming pleasure phones...One more place mobile phones probably don't belong.

-AP

Says Symbian

[glesga_kiss]

Symbian may be the more open of the two, but GPL it ain't - does Linux now have an edge?"

Yeah, and follow the link and you see it's Symbians own webpage that says it's the better. Are peoples bullshit detectors broken when it comes to M$ competitors these days?

Linux as a cell phone OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Using an open source operating system, like Linux, on a cell phone may let people add in functionality by themselves that they would otherwise have to pay extra for.

Wow...

[TJ_Phazerhacki]

Interesting. I have an n-gage, and don't think too highly of it. How long do you figure it'll be before you physically cannot buy a cell phone and service for calls only? No games, ringtones, just battery life and an address book? Too bad, I was liking this whole information revolution thing until I got lost in the middle of it.

Re:Wow...

[bhtooefr]

Games aren't NECESSARY, but ringtones are. Because cell phones are so popular, you need a unique ringtone, or every time a cell phone rings, you'll be looking at yours.

Re:Wow...

[GonzoDave]

Someone actually bought an N-Gage?

Re:Wow...

[enjo13]

For the foreseeable future, you will no trouble getting a 'phone only' phone.. There are still a lot of pieces to the wireless market (infrastructure, carriers, cell phone manufacturers at the highest levels)..

Within a company like Nokia they have many phones in development at all times. Their strategy has always been to target individual phones and very precise markets. If you just want basic phone service, Nokia has a phone for you (not a Symbian phone). If you want more they can do that to.

This works out well for Nokia (they move HUGE volumes in those lower end phones) and the carriers who are interested in getting both the high end (data plans, unlimited minutes, etc..) and the low end (emergency calls only) using their networks. Having worked with many different cell phone manufacturers (we develop for various Symbian flavors) and carriers I'm pretty confident that this is not going to be changing any time soon. They are always VERY concerned about pricing themselves out of the lower end consumer, while wanting to maximize they're return from the higher end. It's a really amazing balancing act, but the end result is that there are (and likely will be) phones for almost every taste.

Re:Wow...

[poot_rootbeer]

How long do you figure it'll be before you physically cannot buy a cell phone and service for calls only? No games, ringtones, just battery life and an address book?

If the handset models with games and ringtones are selling for $9.99 apiece... does it even MATTER?

Re:Wow...

[Kris_J]

Look up "Secondhand". Simple phones are available very cheap and off plan in such places as pawnbrokers. Many give you a decent warranty (they have so many they can just give you another if yours breaks) and most of the phones barely have a scratch on them.

It's not like simple old phones vanish when their first owner doesn't want them anymore. You're thinking of iTunes.

Nokia takes control of a Sybian?

[Anonymous Coward]

The best way to control a Sybian is to start on the *low* speed setting. Trust me, this thing will get all soviet russia and control *YOU* if you're not used to it.

Re:Taking control of simian?

[benjj]

Perhaps they're going to revamp the vibrator function of their cellphones afterall?!

like this? :-)

Re:Oh, phew! I thought you meant Sybian!

[FortKnox]

PHEW! I thought I was going to read a story about symbian without someone 'accidentally' thinking its sybian!

This type of post is almost as old as *BSD is dying on every BSD article!

Good for Linux

[osullish]

I think this is very good for Linux, Any manufacturers who are looking to develop any new handheld technology,but do not want to be tied to any corporation like MS and Nokia will opt for linux - and even though they have a large market share, Nokia aren't completly dominant in the Phone/Handheld market.

Re:Good for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Any manufacturers who are looking to develop any new handheld technology,but do not want to be tied to any corporation like MS and Nokia will opt for linux... Yeah, now they'll be tied to the GPL instead of MS so that their competitors can use the same code too! Of course, this is talking before IBM takes over Linux... - IBM-RH/Linux, the open source kernel (er.. OS?) that will soon need to be pirated!

Re:Good for Linux

[KarmaMB84]

Future IBM: 1) Push out other Linux distributors 2) Refuse to distribute their binaries OR source code to anyone that doesn't sign an agreement not to look at or distribute the source (to receive support). 3) Sell their OS and support to companies for prices that would make Microsoft blush. 4) ... 5) Profit!

This *will* help M$

[lonesometrainer]

Siemens, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, et al (see former ownershop smybian) are all ambitious mobile phone companies. They would be completely dependant on Nokia if they exclusively chose Symbian a.k.a. Nokia Series 60/70.

Instead they'll expand their technological portfolio.

Current situation: nearly no M$ smartphones (except some models from motorola), mostly symbian dominated market.

Possible future situation: M$ *and* Symbian phones from Siemens, Samsung, ...

Conclusion: M$ is the lucky winner.

Damn.

No, I'm New Here

[New Here]

No, I'm New Here

Re:No, I'm New Here

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate you, I hate your country and I hate your face.

But granted, you're one of the more innovative trolls I've seen popping up here lately.

Don't monkey arround

[Anonymous Coward]

You see, it's just another embedded application...

What will Motorola do?

[interiot]

Motorola has at least one phone (a 3G phone, the A920) based on Symbian. I like it so far, the interface is pretty well done. But does this mean Nokia will soon be pushing Motorola away from that as well? Motorola's has released phones with their own OS, Symbian, Linux, and one of microsoft's OS too, so I guess motorola has all sorts of alternatives.

strategy

[dan2550]

although this seems to be exiting for linux's future, i dont think it nessaryily is a great thing. if linux becomes known to everyone (especially the non-techies) as "that cellphone thing", it will become more of a rut for those hoping for it to become a viable desktop for everyone.

Consumers usually choose the phone design...etc

[wongqc]

Having used both types of handset before, I personally feel that the Symbian OS is more user friendly, and better. But ulimately, I believe consumers usually take more into consideration the phone design, weight, stylish factor....than the OS features. As much as I would love to buy a linux phone, it first has to appeal to me in terms of looks and design, and the easy availibility of third party apps.

Re:Consumers usually choose the phone design...etc

[Anonymous Coward]

It is impossible to determine how user firendly Symbian is. It all depends, what is built on top of it - Series 60 from Nokia feels totaly different from UIQ, used in Sony-Erisson and Motorola phones. However, underneath they both use Symbian OS.

Re:Wow... to tell the truth I want lots of stuff

[adzoox]

To tell the truth I want lots of stuff:

An address book that can sync with my computer

A remote to change my TV/DVD/VCR

A remote to cut on my house lights

A calendar

A few games to keep me occupied while waiting for a dinner reservation/girlfriend in the bathroom

A presentation remote for my computer.

A camera - great for emergencies - you always have your phone with you - you rarely have your digicam with you.

A good MP3 player for trips

The cool thing is that all that pretty much exists in the phone I have a Sony P800.

I think the p800 and p900 will be the shift that Sony has already promised away from the Symbian OS and onto Palm (that is powerful enough to do all the above) BUT IT WILL TAKE A COLLABORATION WITH APPLE in my opinion to get the cell phone right. The only reason my phone is what it is now is because it synced to my Mac via Bluetooth.

Heh.

[Anonymous Coward]

You said 'semen'

Re:Taking control of simian?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I install a Fleshlight in my Aibo does that make me a puppy fucker ?!!!!

Re:Oh, phew! I thought you meant Sybian!

[tsvk]

Well, I have always thought that the vibrating alarms in the Nokias have been a bit weak... maybe Sybian could assist in developing a more... uhh... satisfying mobile exprerience.... :)

Re:Oh, phew! I thought you meant Sybian!

[drinkypoo]

Free vibrator advertised with every mobile phone. also MIT accidentally invents cellular sex toy, and there's a vibrator slip cover which I could not find because google has been poisoned badly which I believe it meant for those ubiquitous nokia phones (the basic nokia phone is the honda civic of the cellular world.)

Actually is no longer true.

[vranash]

Actually if you're talking about a Zaurus or whatnot, most of them use compactflash, or at least have the option of using compactflash.

Currently my Zaurus (if I can ever FIND the damn thing) is set up to store everything on the internal flash, system settings and whatnot, and uses the SD-MMC slot to store all the programs/music I want to listen to.

So in fact while some of the original linux based PDAs had that problem, for the most part there's aftermarket distros that take care of the problem, as well as official distros/pdas that no longer have it (My Zaurus had 64 megs of sdram and a 16 meg flash rom.. newer models only have 32 megs of sdram but have 64 megs of flash inside)

Thus your complain is probably no longer an issue.

-- vranash

Re:Actually is no longer true.

[garcia]

You apparently didn't understand what I said... Let me repeat:

I want to know if the OS crashes do you lose the ability to run the programs you installed (that don't come built into the ROM)?

Re:Actually is no longer true.

[pantherace]

The internal storage on a zarus is similar to the bios/harddrive on a PC, so no, unless you manage to corrupt the file system (can happen, but who sane is going to dd to the flash?)

Sharp's original Zaurus (5000D/5500) had a rom (& due to hw limits, continues to act like this) which acted like one and stored all user created docs/installed programs in ram (32MB was storage, 32MB real ram)(with a certain setup so that unless you corrupt it (unlikely) or run out of batteries (much more likely) that it would die.

This is the reason that the later Zarii have more flash, and less ROM, Also, because of it being linux, there are full distros www.openzaurus.org which make the flash writable, and use no RAM as storage, so that docs/programs can install to it & aside from data corruption, you wont lose it. Additionally, All Zaurus models can store data/install programs to CF/SD, and backup the config to those.

I have never had my Zaurus lose data, except when I decided to try an experemental openzaurus (flash the rom) and forgot to backup, which was my fault.

Short answer: not unless you are REALLY unlucky/stupid(ex: dd).

Re:Actually is no longer true.

[vranash]

No, you do not. -- vranash

read the title wrong

[etothen]

Nokia takes control of Sybian?

Microsoft not a competitor to Samsung/Siemens

[blorg]

The problem is that Samsung and Siemens are now essentially being asked to license an OS from, and pay fees to, their largest competitor. As Microsoft just makes software, not the actual phones, it is not seen as a competitor in the same way, and licensing Windows Mobile may not be such a bitter pill to swallow.

Re:Microsoft not a competitor to Samsung/Siemens

[shaitand]

Microsoft doesn't make phones... YET. If they got a lock on the market they'd so be in there.

Re:Microsoft not a competitor to Samsung/Siemens

[tverbeek]

Samsung and Siemens are now essentially being asked to license an OS from, and pay fees to, their largest competitor.

They are still partial owners of Symbian. And they've been paying these licensing fees to Nokia, Psion, Ericsson, Panasonic, and each other, all along. Financially speaking the only change here is that that Psion's share is now Nokia's. That's signficant to the other licensee/owners, but it's not as if Nokia had just bought Symbian outright. Financially it makes more sense to license the software from a company you co-own than one you don't.

The main thing the other owners have lost here is the ability to (collectively) veto Nokia in the boardroom and determine the direction of development and licensing terms... also signficicant, but again not the same as a buyout.

Re:Microsoft not a competitor to Samsung/Siemens

[Jacco de Leeuw]

The problem is that Samsung and Siemens are now essentially being asked to license an OS from, and pay fees to, their largest competitor. As Microsoft just makes software, not the actual phones, it is not seen as a competitor in the same way, and licensing Windows Mobile may not be such a bitter pill to swallow.

Not a bitter pill? Well, there are not manyWindows Mobile Phone Edition licencees, but one of them got royally screwed.

Re:Microsoft not a competitor to Samsung/Siemens

[shrik3]

Samsung and Siemens will also probably prefer paying Nokia since it's a japanese company (national loyalty is very strong in Japan, unless things have changed alot since I last did geography).

Nokia is a Finnish company, Siemens is from Germany and Samsung is Korean. So I wonder where you got this "Japanese national loyalty"?

Symbian is a cult

[Mr. Underbridge]

That damn Symbian Liberation Army is the group that brainwashed Patty Hearst. Don't be their next victim!!

Re:Symbian is a cult

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I dropped the "m" and read it as "Nokia takes control of Sybian" ...and if you have your cell phone on vibrate you can control the speed, direction and throb rate.

the Sybian

Shrewd Move

[sbowles]

1. Buy Symbian
2. Force competition to either:
   • Pay for use of Symbian,
   • Use inferior M$ OS allowing Nokia to lead the "Feature War", or
   • Spend their R&D money developing their own OS putting them squarely behind the proverbial 8-ball.
3. ????
4. Profit!

Re:Shrewd Move

[bstadil]

Spend their R&D money developing their own OS putting them squarely behind the proverbial 8-ball.

More likely:

2. Force the remaining 76% of the worlds handset makers to coalese arounf the Linux kernel.

3.????

4. Loss

Remember Nokia is view as the potential Great Satan by the balance of the makers. They will do almost anything to avoid MS' and Nokia's SW

Re:Shrewd Move

[sbowles]

If the other makers go to a Linux based solution it is still going to take them time to rebuild what they have now, let alone putting in differentiating enhancements. This is either going to be done in isolation or as a collaborative effort (the former taking longer than the latter). If the solution ends up being Open, then Nokia may have the ability to pick and choose which ever of the 2 ends up being best.

The other side of it is that Nokia may have development plans for the OS that they have no interest in sharing with the others. If the consortium is holding back innovation (at least from Nokia's perspective), there may be a flood of new features coming our way.

Re:Shrewd Move

[evilviper]

Force competition to either:
* Pay for use of Symbian,

You think Symbian was free before Nokia bought out Psion?

Nokia Phones Bogged Down by American Monopolies

[stuffduff]

FWIW Nokia has been light years ahead of the U.S. in cell phone technology for over a decade. Hell, just look at the Nokia Communicator. This phone doubles as a pda (and has for several years!). Unfortunately the U.S. markets feel that there is no need for these kind of features so we get stuck with crap for web browsing phones and absolutly astronomical pricing for any data aware wireless devices. I think that this will bode well for Nokia, but we will not see the benifits until Amercian consumers realize that they have been getting second-class wireless data communications and decide to do something about it.

Why can't we just accept a better product when it is already out there instead of having to wait for Microsoft to develop a 'new software tedchnology' and wait still longer for hardware vendors to use it and still end up with an inferior product.

Re:Nokia Phones Bogged Down by American Monopolies

[EricX2]

I'm not sure what your point is. Everybody I know has camera phones with java and games. Also, Nokia phones are the same here in the US as in Europe and the rest of the world. We're not as far back as we were 10 years ago.

Nokia USA
There is the nokia USA site... look at all the phones available here... even the Nokia 9290 Communicator. Heck, the link in your post is going to the nokia usa site. Why do you think it isn't available here?

Re:Nokia Phones Bogged Down by American Monopolies

[stuffduff]

Where I live I can buy the phone, sure. But I can only get 1 company to offer services to use it as a phone and none to provide data services. I don't need camera phones or games. I'd like to quit lugging a laptop! Just try and edit a 2000+ character SQL query or 5000+ line source code file with any of the phones available today, it's almost impossible. With a plug-in on the Nokia I could even get color syntax highlighting, but the crap we get I can't even open it as a text file! Similarly with Simbian I can add my own homegrown apps as opposed to having to go the Visual Studio .Net approach.

But today, I can only get this kind of functionality in about a dozen US cities, the data service runs about 80 bucks a month and only one phone provides it Siemens SX56 Phone, and of course voice minutes are on top of the data rate. Then the SX56 offers no keyboard, and has to be kept in a case to protect its display. Less flexible memory, and of course it's built using a Microsoft OS.

Nokia following Microsoft's model

[blorg]

In a sense. Nokia is moving to a situation where they have a monopoly on control of the Symbian OS. But in buying a controlling stake in Symbian, Nokia will potentially alienate their other cellphone partners, and introduce OS fragmentation on vendor lines in the mobile phone market.

Nokia, with by far the largest mobile market share, will obviously continue to put Symbian into its products. However, will others? Given Sony's heritage with the Clie it is very possible that Sony-Ericsson could move towards Palm-based phones, while Microsoft will push Windows Mobile as an "independent vendor" through playing on other manufacturers' distaste for funding their main competitor, Nokia, with licensing fees.

Motorola

[linuxislandsucks]

MOt disaggreees with your lack of facts dear fool..

Their new handsets are runing linux oh foolish one

When you want real knowledge about Mobile devices ask a real mobile device hacker or view my blog

Re:Motorola

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a twat. Java that and stick it in your mobile device.

Note that Motorola already bet on this

[heironymouscoward]

Last year, it was already obvious that Nokia (who controlled the Symbian UI) would become the primary vendor for Symbian itself.

Motorola tried Microsoft, decided they did not like it, and started to build Linux phones.

This is going to be a three way fight between Symbian, Linux, and Microsoft. My guess is that Symbian will win because it is a superb platform and Nokia have timed this move perfectly.

Linux will beat Microsoft because anyone who is unwilling to pay the Nokia license fees for Symbian is unlikely to want to pay Microsoft either.

But this does not really change things for firms like Samsung - they will probably be happy to ue a standardized UI and OS while also developing their Linux platform on the side.

The big loser here is Microsoft, who might have fragmented a Symbian owned by several people, but are unlikely to score a good hit now.

Re:Note that Motorola already bet on this

[DARKFORCE123]

Please mod this down as Motorola giving up on Microsoft phones is not true! Sounds like FUD to me.

Re:Note that Motorola already bet on this

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't agree, just REPLY! Don't mod down...

Re:Oh, phew! I thought you meant Sybian!

[dbirchall]

Well, there's always Purring Kitty...

Open does increase effectiveness

[pavon]

For example take the entire hypothetical situation in which the OS on which your business depended suddenly becomes under the control of your business rival.

Wouldn't it have been nice to have your own OS, or at least an open one. Or you can just trust that your business rival will play fair and make sure that the OS can be made to work on your platform. It could happen.

Teklogix (industrial handhelds) is all that's left

[blorg]

Basically, Teklogix, which they bought in 2000, is all that's left. They make "industrial" handhelds. In a way, it represents Psion going back to their roots, but I am still somewhat sad that they didn't make more of their mainstream PDA business; I had a number of Psion PDAs, (Series 3, Revo) which in many ways were more functional than the PocketPC I'm using now.

So how does this affect Sony-Ericsson and UIQ?

[shadowj]

Like Nokia, Sony-Ericsson uses Symbian on its top-of-the-line phones (P800 and P900), but they've slapped a completely different user interface called UIQ on them. UIQ is used by a couple of other vendors, too... Motorola and BenQ use it on a couple of their products.

I own both a Nokia 3650 and a Sony-Ericsson P800 and I strongly prefer UIQ. Last I looked Nokia and Sony-Ericsson were competitors. Does this bode well for the future of Symbian/UIQ phones?

Re:So how does this affect Sony-Ericsson and UIQ?

[akiro]

Actually UIQ is the default GUI for Symbian and is made by Symbian itself. It's Nokia who isn't using the standard GUI but has slapped it's own GUI (Series60) on top of Symbian.

Of course now that Nokia owns the majority of Symbian I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to push their own GUI instead of UIQ. Which would generally suck, because I think UIQ is superior too (had a P800).

In my experience you are very incorrect

[FreeUser]

Sadly, interest in things being open source is transitioning (my cynical colleagues might say it already has) from being about controlling quality and maintaining code that a corporation might 'sunset' to being more about religion.

In my experience (working in the financial industry), it goes more like: Happily, interest in things being open source is transitioning from being about controlling quality and maintaining code that a corporation might 'sunset' to being more about security from being held hostage by ones vendor.

In other words, businesses are recognizing the concern and need to have the freedom to conduct their business without coercion from outside, i.e. they are recognizing the value of freedom as being of even greater importance than the cooperative, peer-review paradigm that improves quality.

This is an important breakthrough in corporate mentality, and I have seen it spreading rather quickly among the suits of late.

Strategicly, software freedom (particularly at the infrastructure level such as an operating system) is very important to an enterprise: not just from the orphaning of software your comment implies, but from other forms of vendor lock-in and coercion, be it coercive upgrade cycles that disrupt one's business, security patches that sabatoge competitors products one's enterprise may be using (by submarining in incompatible DLLs, for example), and by having a mission critical, proprietary product yanked when one's vendor suddenly becomes one's competitor.

I've seen all of these things happen, and I suspect Siemens et. al. are very cognizant of this as well. These are scenerios that GPLed software does a great job of protecting against, BSD-licensed software protects against to a lesser degree, and proprietary products leave one completely vulnerable to.

There may be very compelling strategic reasons for these companies to switch to a (currently) inferior GPLed product over a proprietary product rather than risk having their mission critical vendor (Nokia today, Microsoft tommorrow) becoming their most ruthless adversary...reasons that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with "religion."

This joke never gets old!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it does.

An edge?

[mblase]

does Linux now have an edge?

Only if it's a superior OS in terms of compatability, usability, and cutting-edge features. Please remember that on the whole, consumers don't care which phone is more open from a codebase perspective, only whether it supports the features they want.

Microsoft would be very happy to stay in software

[blorg]

Microsoft would be very happy to stay on the software side of things, as long as they can get the hardware OEMs using Windows Mobile. I don't think MS has much of an interest in hardware, seeing that as (ultimately) a commodity business. With the XBox, they needed to get into the console (and more particularly, the 'computer in the living room') business quickly, and saw this as their only way of doing it. Given the amount of money they are losing on it, I don't think they'd see this as a good example of why they should get deeper into hardware.

Things have changed alot...

[blorg]

"Samsung and Siemens will also probably prefer paying Nokia since it's a japanese company (national loyalty is very strong in Japan, unless things have changed alot since I last did geography)."

Nokia is a Finnish company.

Re:Things have changed alot...

[Welsh Dwarf]

My bad, never was too good at geography anyhow :)
The first point still holds though

David

Re:Things have changed alot...

[LeoDV]

Also Samsung is Korean and Siemens is German. :)

GPL = open source?

[n0dez]

GPL isn't the only license available for open source software. There are BSD-style licenses among many others.

Re:Teklogix (industrial handhelds) is all that's l

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah - If Psion were going back to their roots, they'd rerelease Hungry Horace & Psion Flight Simulator...

Porting Linux to Mobile Phones?

[beeblebrox87]

It seems to me it would be Good Thing to be able to choose your phone hardware vendor seperately from what OS your phone would run. It would therefore be helpful to have a port of Linux running on Nokia phones, Sony phones, etc, so that users can choose to install Linux if they wish. The Linux kernel and gcc have already been ported to arm, which most of these phones use, so running Linux would seem to mostly be a matter of supporting I/O devices (GSM, screen, keypad, bluetooth, MMC, speaker, microphone, camera, etc). Are there any efforts currently to get Linux running on mobile phones that ship with Symbian or Windows by default? How proprietary is the hardware? Are there other open-source systems better-suited to this task?

If a Linux for Phones distro was available I'd install it on my Nokia 6600 in a second. Symbian is just too limiting.

Re:Porting Linux to Mobile Phones?

[S3D]

gcc used in the Nokia SDK for armi compiling :) Umm, I'd like to know about Linux port too...

Re:Porting Linux to Mobile Phones?

[S3D]

After some thinking I came to conclusion that it's probably impossible. Symbian sit in the read-only memory, I don't think it's possible to bypass it.

Re:Porting Linux to Mobile Phones?

[beeblebrox87]

nGage games run at a pretty low level, don't they? Just because Symbian has to load at boot doesn't mean we can't immediately kick it out of memory. Anyway, aren't there devices capable of flashing a phone's ROM? This would definitely allow bypassing Symbian.

This is a BAD THING

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the reasons that Symbian was able to get such grand attention and universal support was that so many of the worlds major phone makers had an equal stake and they all had a say in the final process.

If Symbian is now majority owned by Nokia, then Nokia will likely be the only company using it going forward.

Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Siemens, even NEC have all been eating away at Nokia these last 6-9 months. That Symbian market share number is going to drop real fast.

Symbian != Series 60/70.

[Anonymous Coward]

Symbian is a base OS. Series 60/70/90 from Nokia, as well as UIQ from Sony-Ericsson are "GUI's" built on top of Symbian.

Say what?

[DaveOf9thKey]

Motorola tried Microsoft, decided they did not like it, and started to build Linux phones.

Really? Is that why Motorola is releasing three new Microsoft Smartphone models this year?

Source, please.

Re:Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Motorola are releasing phones for Microsoft, phones for Symbian, and phones for Linux.

Not yet -- but soon?

[jpatokal]

As the submitter of the article...

What "Linux on a PDA" needs is backing from a big vendor with plenty of cash to back it up. The only way this is going to become a reality in a fast moving sector such as PDAs is to play in the big arena with the giants (Microsoft and Nokia).

Yes, this is exactly what I meant. If a big phone company -- say, Siemens or Samsung -- wants to compete without licensing Symbian or whatever Microsoft's portable OS is called today, pretty much the only option (other that slugging it out alone and dying a painful death) would be to use GPL software like Linux. Sure, it would take a lot of work to make it match the latest Symbian, but that's not the target market: the cheaper price becomes more attractive in the lower segment, where you don't really need all that much in the way of UI software. And then that can grow incrementally the way GPL projects do.

And FWIW, I have a brand-new Nokia 6600 with Symbian... and underneath the pretty chrome, the GUI is painfully slow, maldesigned and crash-prone.

Cheers,
-j.

Not good for independent developers...

[S3D]

[/paranoid mode on] It seems Nokia will squeeze independent developer more soon. Until recently Nokia SDK was free, now they talking about taking payment for it. They have "Nokia OK" programm - developer have to pay for testing, or get installation security warning. If other companies drop Symbian, Nokia remain sole owner and can force developers to pay for licenses to develop for Symbian... [/paranoid mode off]

Is that brick in your pocket or are you...

[Doktor Memory]

Oh please. One of my co-workers actually bought one of those things about a year back. The damn thing is huge. Seriously, it's larger than the original analog AMPS cell phone I had ten years ago. It's an interesting technology demo, sure, but not something that any actual human being would want to cart around and use.

I think he actually cried when I showed him my Treo 270. Then he bought one himself. :)

Re:Is that brick in your pocket or are you...

[gl4ss]

ceo's & other upper management like those things, really. they also like to talk to it in speaker mode.

they've also made them(in different flavours) for a while, must have been back in 1996 or something when some guy used irc from one regularly(beats me just now what kind of a setup it was, must have used the modem to dial into something that provided a terminal probably, but can't remember everything from 7-8 years back I suppose).

though personally I don't like them(communicators).. series60 is ok though and with reasonable number of devices(and hopefully more soon)...

Re: Is that brick in your pocket or are you...

[gidds]

Please don't tell me what I want. I know what I want, and believe it or not the Communicator isn't too big -- in fact, it's too small.

Coincidentally enough, I use a Psion 5mx, the platform for which Symbian's OS was originally designed. Yes, I 'cart' it around. It lives in my trouser pocket, where it's very happy (no jokes please, missus), and is always accessible. I've seen a Communicator briefly, and discussed it at length with users, and I can tell that, compared with the 5mx, its lack of touch screen, poky keyboard, limited memory, small screen, and inaccessible software would make it far less useful to me.

Of course, not everyone is like me. But then, not everyone's like you either, so please don't judge everything by your standards.

Re:Wow... to tell the truth I want lots of stuff

[realcheese]

You forgot:

A keyless entry remote for the car.

A remote car starter.

Re:Wow... to tell the truth I want lots of stuff

[gl4ss]

*I think the p800 and p900 will be the shift that Sony has already promised away from the Symbian OS and onto Palm (that is powerful enough to do all the above) BUT IT WILL TAKE A COLLABORATION WITH APPLE in my opinion to get the cell phone right. The only reason my phone is what it is now is because it synced to my Mac via Bluetooth.*

I'm not getting this,(presumably se) p800 and p900 are symbian 7.0 uiq based so where you getting with this them being the 'shift' onto palm?

Mod parent up!

[wheany]

Mod parent up, +1 hilarious!

No, the Nokia 92X0 is basically a Revo

[Moderation abuser]

Pretty much the same story here.

The 9210/9290 is a Revo with more RAM, colour display, multimedia and integrated into a mobile phone. If you're happy with a Revo you will be completely comfortable with a 92X0.

The keyboard isn't as nice, and no touch screen but otherwise it's spot on. It's Epoc version 6 rather than 5.

It's what Psion *should* have been doing and it's the only PDA/smartphone worth using, especially for a business. Bit pricey but easily worth it.

Re:No, the Nokia 92X0 is basically a Revo

[ElGuapoGolf]

Great phone, but who carries it? Do any of the major carriers sell this? If they do, I'd really consider it when my verizon contract is up next month.

On second look, it's apparently not available in the States... (at least the 9290).

Re:Wow... to tell the truth I want lots of stuff

[raul]

The p800 is not a sony product is more an Ericsson product(like is the t68 that was branded as Ericsson phone before the SonyEricsson joint venture), I have in my hands two years ago one prototype of p800 without memory stick. The p900 is just only an evolution of it and it is still much Ericssonish.
And Ericsson has invest a lot in symbian/epoc and the mobile is very attached to the symbian platform.
To change it, sonyericsson will have to redisign a lot.
So don't count a lot of a sonyericsson palm phone.

Nokia always has been the enemy of progress

[threeturn]

For all their great marketing Nokia have always been terrible at really making data over cellular work for users. They have mostly put their efforts in to trying to create a Microsoft style monopoly and to make it hard for other companies or individuals to make innovative mobile data services. Lets look at some of the horrible things they have inflicted on us:

• GPRS which is a completely overengineered way of running data over GSM. Nokia's poor ideas implemented in GPRS have lead to its low throughput, excessive latancy and over complicated configuration.
• WAP which was mostly driven by Nokia has cut mobiles off from the real WWW and created an unnecessary and largely useless new markup language. The kind of simplified HTML used in I-Mode is a much better solution.
• A campaign to create a ".mobile" TLD which will mess-up the Internet address space by being completely redundant and badly overlapping with the existing domain usage. BTW they also propose that sites with a ".mobile" TLD MUST use the terrible mobile data protocols which they have been instrumental in defining.

I could go on, but I hope this has made the point!

Psion's business strategy?

[Moderation abuser]

1: Make fabulous PDAs which are years ahead of the competition.

2: Don't tell anyone.

3: Give up on the PDA business as a silly idea and give away the technology.

4: ?????

5: Profit.

Financial issue not as important as control

[blorg]

I think the financial issue is probably not as important as the control issue. Symbian has now changed from an independent consortium over which no one phone company had a controlling stake, to a company in which Nokia has a controlling stake. As such I am presuming that Nokia can now control the future direction of the OS. I may be wrong on that point (feel free to correct me) but if that is the case I don't know how attractive that is to other phone companies. Symbian's lead, and popularity with many phone companies, was at least partially due to its independence, which it has now lost.

Symien Sybian

[Gunnery Sgt. Hartman]

I thought it said Nokia takes controll of Sybian. What now? Dial an orgasm?

Bill knew this was coming in 1998

[ms139us]

This has been coming for over 5 years. It is just the beginning.

Re:Microsoft would be very happy to stay in softwa

[shaitand]

The xbox is the least of the hardware that microsoft currently manufactures.

Finland and Japan not too different

[blorg]

Heh. Completely off-topic, but Finnish is actually possibly related to Japanese.

Re:Finland and Japan not too different

[Anonymous Coward]

Both Japanase and Finnish language are of Ural-Altaic origin.

Re:Finland and Japan not too different

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm. I see this stated as a fact, yet in discussions I see experts express more doubt. The Ural-Altaic link is a theory in development (hypothesis is perhaps closer to the mark) but it is a long way off yet to conclude the issue.

Morbid tangent: People in Finlan, Hungary and Japan top the world suicide statistics; another Ural-Altaic link?

Re:Taking control of simian?

[KarmaMB84]

An orgasm every time my cell phone rang would be well worth the money.

Sorry, Qtopia sucks

[Moderation abuser]

I have no problem with Linux on a PDA. I own a Zaurus sl-5500 but... It sucks... It's really bad as a PDA, the user interface badly needs massive amounts of work to make it as usable as the competition. The integrated applications badly need to be... well... integrated.

e.g. The Symbian word processor supports embedding of objects from the other applications; sounds, images, spreadsheets, charts etc. It has a spell checker a thesaurus, styles, outline mode, templates.

The Symbian spreadsheet uses workbooks, named ranges, most functions, line/column/XY/etc charts.

The database is fairly straightforward but again supports embedding of objects like photographs, sounds, spreadsheets, charts as well as free text searching of the fields.

Best of all though is the agenda; Todo lists, anniversaries, appointments, events. Embed word documents, recordings, pictures. Switch to day, week, month, year, time, tasks, anniversary views

And... It's all smaller, more efficient than Linux, the interface is well designed for small screens and the user can do everything from the keyboard as well as the touch screen. It all backs up and synchronises with most PC desktop productivity apps automatically.

Add on reliability, massive amounts of handy 3rd party applications and the result is that machines like the Psion series 5, Revo and now the Nokia 9210/9290 are a thoughtless pleasure to *use* on a daily basis.

Linux *could* be fantastic on a PDA/smartphone, there's no reason it couldn't be but I haven't yet seen any implementation worth the pain of using it.

Re:Sorry, Qtopia sucks

[demachina]

"It's really bad as a PDA, the user interface badly needs massive amounts of work to make it as usable as the competition."

Perhaps you could be more precise on what needs to be fixed. This sounds somewhat more like an opportunity than a problem.

As far as embedding objects, that is cool but I'm not sure how critical it is to the majority of cell phone user or to the success of the platform. Not sure most people have to have a full featured word processor or spreadsheet on a phone. A good calendar, todo list and adress book, with sync, are things that need to be nailed.

I agree Qt's weight is something of a problem but there aren't a lot of available options that aren't incomplete by comparison.

The key point about making Linux competitive on the desktop or a handheld is to settle on a single platform and develop and polish it until its a beauty. Perhaps this is to much to hope for the ragtag army of geeks that use Linux. Its a lot easier to just say "It sucks", start divisive religious wars, and develop a dozen incomplete, badly polished, competing GUI's with applications that don't interoperate at all. Then just say everything SUCKS and switch to a proprietary platform. Thats kind of a damning commentary on the future of open source development though.

By just mentioning Qt I instantly invited the wrath of the half of the community whose motto is "GTK or die". Maybe Linux is doomed outside of the server world as the original poster suggested.

How's That For A Freudian Slip

[JohnPerkins]

Nokia Takes Control Of Sybian...

Re:Wow... to tell the truth I want lots of stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

They already have memory stick phone cards in japan for Clies! It's happening sooner than you think.

Too bad

[SPYvSPY]

iSynch won't recognize my P900. :(

Re:Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

try the latest bluetooth update - are you fully updated 10.2.8/isync?

Re:Oh, phew! I thought you meant Sybian!

[the - O.ster]

how the hell do you guys answer so fast?!

I wanted to be the first to crack that joke.

(Not to mention the fact that i'm now looking at ANOTHER big fat 1)

Linux for mobile phones

[sysopd]

Symbian may be the more open of the two, but GPL it ain't - does Linux now have an edge?

A better question would be, "Does Free Software have an edge?" (which could run on uCinux, etc).

What makes symbian a quality OS is not so much the kernel but the support infrastructure/libraries built up around it. The kernel is important as it is real-time, low-overhead, and provides power management among other things specifically for mobile devices. But the strength is in the libraries.

Symbian provides apps for a calendar, contacts, and documents/notes. They have (G)UI support built in. Symbian has extensive networking, multimedia (WAV, BMP, GIF, JPEG, etc..), and browser support ALL tuned for rapid deterministic execution with little dynamic allocation.

If GNU/Linux wants to be a player in the mobile market, then the community needs to:

A) Ramp up the RTOS features of ucLinux (now a part of 2.6.x) and encorporate driver support for things like GPRS, GSM, GPS, SMS, etc

and,

B) Develop an advanced suite of software libraries for developing low-footprint mobile systems consisting of (G)UIs, peripheral support, and data accessibility/connectivity.

I am currently unaware of any competitive (or any, really) GNU/Linux solutions for the mobile/cellular market (let me know of any that do exist). The kernel alone is not enough to move developers when such mature development platforms (ie, Symbian) exist.

Does it?

[Anonymous Coward]

does Linux now have an edge?
Yeah. Between ribs.

Symbian And MS low Market Share -- Java is the OS

[mobileTen]

There about 100 million to 150 million Java Phones sold todate but only about 6 million Smart Phones Symbian/MS/Palm - Even most Nokia Phones run Java Series 40 but only the top end models run Symbian (Series 60). So this is the war that Sun is winning. Both Symbian and M$ are irreverent... What does one need from the Symbian O/S that one can't do with Java (J2ME)?

Who chooses your phone? Not you...

[alwynschoeman]

2 things, 1) From a manufacturer's viewpoint I would rather be proprietary Nokia than proprietory Mcrosoft. 2) You as a consumer picks an operator. The operator picks the phones available to you. Their choices are in some cases influenced by ignorant business people and clueless CTO's. They pick Microsoft because it is SOOOO cool to be able to show a Powerpoint presentation from you phone. Be Smart, pick a smart operator and support a market where you still have a choice.

Thats why their j2me implementation suck!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh, I thought there had to be a reason as to why their kvm sucked so bad. Dont even try open a socket:...You'll waste your time... And why do they even bother with that NDK-for j2me( I was so happy they had a Linux version :/ )? I wont have to test my apps on nokia-terminals.. they wont work anyway.... Ahhh those Finns...

Nah...

[Ghengis]

Sony Ericsson, Siemens, Samsung... most of them are using Nokia's version of Symbian anyway (Series 60). The one's that aren't, but are using Symbian will probably just use Series 60 as it's just a "look and feel" modification of the Symbian base. Besides, Nokia already has Series 60 contracts with some of these companies which will be in effect for well over 18 months, which in the mobile industry, is almost an eternity.

Re:Oh, phew! I thought you meant Sybian!

[Anonymous Coward]

>This type of post is almost as old as *BSD is dying on every BSD article!
But...isn't it??

Moto has both Linux and MS phones; you're an idiot

[JimTheta]

I work for Motorola, though this post is representative of my opinions and knowledge only. It is not representative of the company in any way.

Motorola has an upcoming Linux line of phones (MotoJuix), and a recently released line of Windows phones (MotoPro). I believe both lines are supported parallelly. Many of our phones run neither, to my knowledge. It looks to me that Motorola has not put too many eggs in any one basket.

I'm a software engineer, but I don't work with OS issues, so I don't know too much. I do know, however, that the parent poster has no idea what he's talking about.

(Is parallelly a word?)

It's on their web page.

[Moderation abuser]

I think the 9290 is the USA model and 9210 the european GSM model.

http://www.nokiausa.com/phones/go/1,6796,phoneco de :9290|from:combuy,00.html