Slashdot Mirror
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."
thats what i herd. LOL!
Does this mean that SCO will be now charging $699 to cell phone users?
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
Getting my P800 to recognize vi graffiti? Weird.
man rtfm
This almost makes me feel a little outdated.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?
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.
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!
One advantage of a Linux-Based smartphone is that their software is often written with a slightly more "open" mentality (possibly because parts of it are under the GPL). I have found that it makes writing simple tools and utilities easer, when compared to (for example) a Windows CE based phone. This is kind of surprising, as I do most of my software development (for work) on windows.
As for my sig, it refers to home, not work. After all, commercial software is written for people willing to buy it.
..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.
...I just had this vision of hundreds if not thousands of Geeks running around and setting up Linux Smartphone Beowulf Clusters...
How many Phones Does it take to answer the question "can you hear me now"?
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. -- Hunter S. Thompson
"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.
A beowulf mob-cluster of wi-fi smartphones!
A little off topic, but what do you Linux lovers think of the upcoming Motorola MPX.
I think this form factor is great, and the device is loaded - Bluetooth AND WiFi. I'll be upgrading my TMobile Pocket PC Phone Edition (XDA) as soon as the MPX is available.
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 $10 a pop, or even closed-source C/C++ apps written with a commercially licensed copy of Qtopia or the like...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
The article's reference to Openwave's device products is really about their application suite for mobile devices, Phone Suite V7. V7 provides the missing piece to Linux, the "expensive-to-develop" embedded application software, including web browsing, messaging, file management, media playback, etc.
V7 also has a framework that lets phone makers develop custom applications and UI, including a kick-ass graphics engine (think Java 2D), UI framework, and all the goodies you need on a resource constrained device (much more constrained than a smartphone), which we use to build these applications.
When phone makers look at Linux by itself, it lacks the necessary phone application stack which is both tricky and expensive to develop, and is where V7 provides the solution.
There's a good discussion on OSNews about V7 (can't seem to find it right now), and some press release-ish stuff on LinuxDevices
Note: I'm one of the core developers working on this project, so factor that in accordingly.
... but Symbian seems to be doing quite well as a cell phone operating system, with a decent SDK. I still can't do anything on my Mac with the SDK, but hopefully that will change soon. Nokia has done well so far, and the new devices coming out this fall look friggin great.
I don't need my phone to run apache, I need it to work.
- oZ
// i am here.
Hurd?
ROFL!
Though sometimes I wish I left Wince ....
....
..... and because everything is so simplified, you cannot point a program to eg a bluetooth port to use it as serial ...
... when you have the freedom to use /dev/rfcomm0 instead of always-changing-never-working com1-4(+some virtual crap) and that's when you can comfortably run ppp-over-bt, so you can rsync, and pipe the whole mess into your custom perl script that inserts it into mysql ....
:) I want ....
...
(M$ 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!
The scalability of the Linux kernel and such projects as uclinux are what make this possible. The problem with this is that the custom hardware, combined with different cpu architectures and speeds, will cause incompatibility or at least cause performance to suffer with applications between different mobile devices. Standardization of hardware, software, or both, would greatly help these problems be remedied.
Props to GNAA!
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.
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.
Re. cell phone safety--I read a recent study (New Scientist, perhaps?) that showed cell phones cause extreme damage to rat brains. But our skulls are thicker, so it may not matter for humans. Regardless, people who drive and talk on cell phones will die much quicker deaths than if they were to develop brain cancer.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
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...)