Slashdot Mirror
Linux Smartphones Race To Be 1st In U.S.
An anonymous reader writes "The race is on for first mover in the domestic US Linux smartphone market! Last week, Motorola announced a new Linux-based business user smartphone that's expected to ship to US customers by the end of 2004. Meanwhile, Chinese phone maker e28 will debut its latest Linux-based smartphone at LinuxWorld this week, and will soon begin distributing it in the Chicago area. Both devices are pretty cool. The quad-band Moto phone features a 1.3 megapixel camera, Intel's latest cell-phone chip, and fancy sync software that (currently only) works with Microsoft email servers at this point (others pending). e28's phone is an upgrade to its previously announced e2800, which became the world's first commercially available Linux phone when it shipped in China in August, 2003 [Slashdot discussion]. Interestingly, e28 was founded in 2002 by the former president of Mot's Asia Pacific cell phone division -- the world's largest mobile market."
Competition is great, I would love to get a smart phone that runs linux based kernel and allows for development without strings attached. Currently, Symbian phones are difficult to debug for. Microsoft phones... I won't even go into that.
;)
Some phone manufacturers are attempting to lock users from installing their own custom software, some are trying to prevent people writing for the phones without paying royalties (signed apps).
Power to the user, if I can tweak with my phone as much as I can do with my pc - it's all good news.
I just hope it won't take minutes to boot like my Fedora Core 2 at the moment
-- shortcut - the longest distance between two points.
Check out their new RAZR V3 as well ...
A linux based phone that only works with M$ mail... What is the world coming to!
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
something you should remember, just because it's linux based underneath doesn't mean it'll give the customer(you) any access to the system underneath or means to customize it beyond installing j2me apps. in most(all) cases these 'linux based' phones are not supposed to show what they are to the customer at all anyways(linux just happens to be a good fit for the os underneath, the customer isn't supposed to ever see it though and the customer apps supposed to be all java which makes software & sdk support a whole lot easier for them).
symbian phones give surprisingly(scary) good access to the hardware underneath.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Nearly any phone with Java capability and a PC sync cable allows you to write your own apps and upload them.