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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."
This almost makes me feel a little outdated. I think I'm the only one left that has a normal cell phone. No gadgets except a couple crappy games, an alarm clock, and the phone itself. I've never thought you needed anything other than a phone when you bought a cell phone.
Does this mean I'll have to hand in my geek T-shirt?
umm.. just wondering.. do you really think they give the phone(which retails at 700euros+) FREE, that the money comes from thin air? of course they don't, they suck up the price in the plan and calls and thus it becomes impossible for the consumer to actually make informed decisions about what they're really buying, calls or renting a phone.
happen to be living in a place with the cheapest calls and selling phones along in plans is illeagal here.
also the mobile phone penetration is among the highest in the world(so no, plans with phones don't really help that).
I'm posting from Australia, so I don't know the lie of the mobile land in your part of the world.
1. It's gonna bring the price down, no question. Lots of proprietary software in those little handheld phones.
The first phone I bought this year, a Siemens A55, cost me AU$99 pre-paid. That's about US$80. A $3 data cable from eBay and it was flash-upgraded to become a C55, which enabled the Java and Data Access functions, which leads me to...
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.
My laptop has 9,643 MIDI ringtones, and I've found a site with heaps more MIDI's that I like. I simply copy them to the phone via the data cable. Before you jump on me, telling me that this is Windows only crap, I've also got the AT command spec for the Siemens range, and I've written a program in Visual Basic that allows me to upload MIDI's to the phone. The program is reasonably trivial; I ported it to my Mac in Future Basic in an evening (and this included the SMS sending function, too).
Last week I upgraded to a Siemens C60, and the same data cable and software lets me do all the fun stuff with ringtones (and unlocking, for that matter) as before. Since getting it, I spent the weekend learning Java (specifically, J2ME) and wrote a Tetris game for the C60. With a bit of effort, I can get the game running on my wife's A55 (which is also now a C55).
So, why do I need a Linux phone when I have a Java phone?
The article's reference to Openwave's device products is really about their application suite for mobile devices, Phone Suite V7. V7 provides the missing piece to Linux, the "expensive-to-develop" embedded application software, including web browsing, messaging, file management, media playback, etc.
V7 also has a framework that lets phone makers develop custom applications and UI, including a kick-ass graphics engine (think Java 2D), UI framework, and all the goodies you need on a resource constrained device (much more constrained than a smartphone), which we use to build these applications.
When phone makers look at Linux by itself, it lacks the necessary phone application stack which is both tricky and expensive to develop, and is where V7 provides the solution.
There's a good discussion on OSNews about V7 (can't seem to find it right now), and some press release-ish stuff on LinuxDevices
Note: I'm one of the core developers working on this project, so factor that in accordingly.
... but Symbian seems to be doing quite well as a cell phone operating system, with a decent SDK. I still can't do anything on my Mac with the SDK, but hopefully that will change soon. Nokia has done well so far, and the new devices coming out this fall look friggin great.
I don't need my phone to run apache, I need it to work.
- oZ
// i am here.
Though sometimes I wish I left Wince ....
....
..... and because everything is so simplified, you cannot point a program to eg a bluetooth port to use it as serial ...
... when you have the freedom to use /dev/rfcomm0 instead of always-changing-never-working com1-4(+some virtual crap) and that's when you can comfortably run ppp-over-bt, so you can rsync, and pipe the whole mess into your custom perl script that inserts it into mysql ....
:) I want ....
...
(M$ pocketpc) on my (38xx) IPAQ, most of the time I a happyly type pppon on the tiny (virtual) keyboard to fire up my GPRS-over-ppp-over-bluetooth-over-my_t68i while sitting on the toilet doing my morning business (eg reading slashdot.org/palm/ or checking if my site stats & email)
While I am pissed I could not get certain things working under linux on the ipaq, I am happy with the flexibility to change whatever I want.... and run things however I want them
so why do I bring that up ?
I have a t68i, my wife has a nokia 6310i and I tried win2k and XP to sync these monsters for hours (if not days) and I always found the "easy to use" way the most frustrating, because I always need it a different way
and that's when linux comes in
the question is: do I want and other device that I can hack-to-hell?
YES
I just wish the manufacturers give full spec to everything so I do not end up without bt or infraport or whatever
If cell phones used UV or higher spectrum radiation you might have a point. But considering cellphone radiate lower energy photons than you do(infrared), I think you're pretty safe.
What keeps me from buying a cellphone is the fact that someone might call me on it. Am I the only person in the world who prefers to be inaccessible?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
We all want to have a Linux cellphone, but have you wondered why business would want it too? They don't seem to see the urge to ssh to their cell phone. :)
:)
Royalty - cellphone manufacturers must pay royalty for each cellphone running either Palm, Symbian or CE. This is a huge revenue for smartphone OS vendors especially when the cellphone is popular. Some company like Sharp develops their smartphone OS inhouse but soon see the benefit of adopting other OS like Symbian and Linux.
Though I don't know how much royalty they charge, because it's a purely business secret(they may charge differently for different companies). However, you can take the reference of SUN's royalty - they charge $1 for each cellphone sold carrying their java runtime. You get the picture - it'd be no less than $1.
Now you may see the business benefit of adopting Linux - royalty free. Of course, some embedded Linux vendors would still charge royalty, but it'd be much less than Symbian, Palm and CE due to its nature.
It's not going to help security that much. Manufacturers won't be motivated to allow you to download a software patch to your phone. They'd rather encourage you to buy a new phone.
In the long run, people will find bugs, so the next generation of phone will have fixes. But to get those fixes, you'll need a new phone.
At the IBM PartnerWorld 2004 conference the guys at the Sharp booth had a pre-release version of the Sharp SL-6000 Linux based PDA and they claimed that there was a cell phone card or sleeve available for it. As far as I can tell, this card is not commercially available yet.
As compared to the older Zaurii, this device was much larger, but was also, clearly, designed with some thought towards making it a viable phone. For example, the mic and speaker on the back of the case were positioned so it would be usable as a phone. In addition, the audio jack was a 3.5mm stereo jack suitable for use with stereo output, but was also configured to be able work with an earphone/boom mike combo so it could be used as a phone and PDA at the same time. This sure beats most other PDA's that choose either a sub-mini earbud/mic jack, sacraficing the ability to use the device as an MP3 player or a stereo out only jack. They also designed the SL-6000 so that it could accomodate a sleeve rather than being limited to the small form factor slots, so this would make a cell phone easier to incorporate. The darned thing even has voice recognition technology, though it doesn't seem to be integrated with the phone technology, so you can't ask it to dial the phone via a voice command... yet.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)