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Linux Smartphones On The Rise
nostriluu writes "I know, some people want their cell phone to just be a cell phone. To those people, I suggest a second hand phone. For those of us who want to cram as much functionality as possible into a device we are going to bother carrying everywhere, there is the promise of the Linux Smartphone. I've had a P800 for over a year now and while it's great (although a brick), I can't wait for a Linux based device to bring the culture of openness and upgradability, as opposed to the intentional obsolesence and $10 for every little utility someone reinvents for "closed" devices."
Linux is good for expert level users.Most of the best selling cell phones do not have linux. Why cell phone makers dont user a free OS Linux ? All function loaded cell phones do not have linux today, why ?
Further, people want cell phone for free. With my experience with www.dealsofamerica.com it appears people like to buy bestseller only. They do not go in for research or so.
My a, q, and 9 all look the same. I doubt any handwriting-recognition software could figure out the difference without context (vi != English, after all).
The benefits are twofold, and the same as they are for computers:
1. It's gonna bring the price down, no question. Lots of proprietary software in those little handheld phones.
2. Better security. No better way to iron all the bugs out than opening up the source.
And maybe some cheaper ringtones while we're at it. I'd love to be able to do my own, rather than buying them at $1 each.
Boycott everything - they're all trying to fuck you one way or another
You Europeans and Asians have it so good. You can actually get the P800 or P900 with a service plan there, so it doesn't cost $1000.
Rots of ruck with that here in the US, despite the fact that three major carriers have GSM networks that would work just FINE with the P-series.
I say we worry about getting providers to let us Americans have the *current* crop of smartfones before we worry about whether Linux will be on the next generation of them...
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
..to the sofar planned linux smartphones is pretty slim. carriers would obviously like them because it could be easy for them to add the stuff they want and then lock it up, but nowhere in those plans is symbian like compatibility between different devices from different manufacturers for stuff you coded up during your freetime.
It's a nice idea I give it that much but the one's currently thinking/planning it aren't really intrested in 3rd party programs running on it(well, midp sure but that doesn't really count against symbian or ms smartphone* native apps).
Linux doesn't equate to OPEN automatically.
and yeah, the 3rd party stuff IS a big deal..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
There's a thing as "too much" technology.
'nuff said.
"I know, some people want their cell phone to just be a cell phone. To those people, I suggest a second hand phone."
:)
:)
I, too used to be this unenlightened. I used to carry my Nokia 7650 around with me everywhere. And then one day, I lost it, and it forced a total rethink of the way I view phones. Did I really want to hunt around for a camera/organiser/games machine etc etc etc? In the end I plumped for a Xelibri (http://www.xelibri.com) - it doesn't do a whole lot, but does everything I need it to do - calls, sms, polyphonic ring tones and an alarm
I liken it to digital watches in the 80s. I remember everyone owning a watch with a calculator, some with thermometers, but now if you look at digital watches, they rarely are chock full of features, instead choosing to look good. That's what I want from my phone, something that looks good rather than something that is chock full of 100s of features I never use.
And, no, I'm not an anti-Linux zealot. In fact, I found my switch to a deliberately featureless, yet entirely sexy phone oddly paralleled my change from Windows to Linux a while back
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
Mmm, no. The problem is that while there are plenty of super-basic cell-phones, they're cheaply built and lack even the slightest intelligence in their design. Meanwhile there are supercomputer phones with switch-watch construction and design.
There's no real middleground, and the low-end of the market is showing zero innovation. All I really wanted was a phone with a good phonebook(ie, could handle more than 1 # for someone) and bluetooth. I did finally find one- Siemens S56, but it's been less than a picnic. For example, it makes a hugely annoying set of tones, very loudly, while it "connects", but regular audio is whisper-quiet even cranked up all the way. WTF? For this, I paid over $100. Absurd.
At least it's better than the Nokia phone I had...god, that thing had a UI that was about as intelligible as ancient sumerian, read underwater, backwards.
Please help metamoderate.
"I can't wait for a Linux based device to bring the culture of openness and upgradability"
Um, what? There is no guarantee that a Linux-based system will bring any sort of "openness" to anything. NEWS FLASH: Corps don't like Linux because it's open. Corps like Linux because it's free (AS IN BEER). It would be trivial to produce a Linux-based phone with a JVM that runs closed-source Java apps that you buy at $10 a pop, or even closed-source C/C++ apps written with a commercially licensed copy of Qtopia or the like...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
The big benefit for businesses is not being squeezed by a large monopoly like Microsoft. Or licensing an OS from their #1 competitor, Nokia.
The GPL ensures that the company can always find someone to support the OS; no lock-in to a single vendor. It's called a free market economy. This is exactly what made IBM-Compatible PC's such a big thing. Linux will have a great future.
Linux aside, you don't have to pay for these utilities. You could just get a copy of embedded VB/C (free download from MS) and write your own. Its really quite easy to do.
Personally, I love the Palm platform. My Palm phone is far, far, far more open and far more hackable than any other piece of consumer electronics I own, with the possible exception of Tivo. Palm doesn't give away the source code for the core of their OS. True. But I've never really found anything lacking in what I can do with the SDKs and frameworks they provide for writing Palm apps.
Meanwhile, I guess you'd rather use vi or emacs on your Linux PDA instead of buying a 10 dollar piece of document editing software that a small software company or independent shareware developer bothered to make. And if there aren't any good handheld-scale GUI apps that will be written for your Linux PDA's GUI APIs of choice? You're probably one of those people that will just whine about it instead of writing one yourself ("but I'm not a programmer... whine... it needs to be Open Source... and I'm not going to pay 10 dollars for it, of course").
It's great to see Linux getting used in more consumer electronics devices, and that's cool and all, but really the companies aren't using Linux because it's Free as in speech, they're using it because it's free as in beer. And they are going to write closed source GUI apps for it, like Tivo and others have, because they want to make money, not invite competition.
In a world where people spend $3.2 Billion on ring tones a year (*10% of the global music market*) I don't think this is gonna happen. The iPod-mini shows that the average user has preferences totally intagible to geeks. I'm sure 99%+ don't have even the vaguest perception of what OS is running on their phone. Linux is not going to be a consumer-pushed movement in this market.