Mobile Linux Challenges Windows Mobile

An anonymous reader writes "Taking a page from Microsoft's playbook, MontaVista today announced an embedded Linux platform aimed specifically at mobile phones. 'Mobilinux' is based on a 2.6 kernel with real-time and power-management enhancements, and targets 'feature-phones' as well as the higher-end devices targeted by Microsoft with its Windows Mobile for Smartphones offering."

Comments

Linux 2.6 is slower than 2.4...

[Dark Coder]

I would be wary of going into 2.6 over 2.4 kernel for low-power application such as a cell phone.

Check out the Linux v2.4 vs. Linux v2.6

Re:Mobile Phones Feature Musts

[mr. mulder]

Thinking this through further, what business users need is an inexpensive open-source solution architecture that provides a HTTP-based syncronization mechinism for transferring mail between handhelds and corporate servers.

Blackberry has done the ultimate-super-expensive version of this where it is completely closed-source. They've even brought it to the level of selling their own hardware.

A successful open-sourced project surrounding this topic would do the following:

1. define an xml/soap based protocol for formatting and transmitting email to mobile devices. keeping in mind that this is a business-geared standard, you would want support for encryption, authentication, pass-through authentication, synchronization, etc.

2. somehow hype this so that everyone begins to include it in their products as THE protocol for mobile email syncronization

3. build a server-end piece that integrates with all of the industry standard mail servers

4. build plug-ins for mail clients that utilize this protocol.

Problems that will arise: Microsoft will embrace the protocol, but then create its own protocol called the eProtocol (enhanced-protocol). They'll tout it as the new industry standard and incorporate their new "e" version into Exchange Server 2015. By 2017, everyone will realize that eProtocol sucks and that the standard protocol needs serious revisions. That will lead us back to this same conversation we're in right now. But, by that time, XML and SOAP will be the old industry standard and we'll find even more bloated ways of representing data by encapsulating it with somehting new...but this won't matter because we'll be surfing on our mobile devices at DSL speeds.

Re:finally, an X11-based mobile environment

[torpor]

Pfft. You don't need X11.

directfb+SDL+cairo(glitz)+SVG == pure portable GUI mannah.

I'm lovin' it, personally ...