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Linux-Based Phone Lasts 200 Hours on Standby
An anonymous reader writes "Motorola is showing off a Linux/Java phone with a claimed battery life of 200 hours on standby, or 200-250 minutes when talking. If those figures prove true, Linux sure is improving quickly on the power management front. That kind of battery life also suggests that the E895 might be the first single-chipset phone ever to run a complex OS, whether Symbian, Windows Mobile, or Linux. Other features are user-upgradable memory, 1.3MP camera, video capture, multimedia slideshows, and more. Hopefully a more U.S.-friendly version will follow, as happened when Mot's Linux-based quad-band A780 came out a year or so after it's tri-band forebear, the A768, shipped in China."
I seems there are at least 4 totally isolated dev teams at Motorola.
They have
1. Multiband Phones running Linux (A780, this one, etc)
2. UMTS phones running Symbian UIQ (A1000, E1000, etc)
3. Clamshell-Phones running Windows Mobile (MPx220...)
4. and finally the ultra slim phones running Motorola's own OS (RAZR V3...)
Wow. Compare this to Nokia, they have about 3 basic setups with 50 different designs.
While I agree with your fundamental point, I'm a software engineer at Mot, and you can get a BASH prompt on the thing - you can also telnet and ssh into it. Granted, this isn't available to the average customer, its still cool. In addition many of the system services are run with SysV style init script. I don't know that anyone's actually done it, but there is speculation that we could make the phone software run on a regular PC, if we did a little emulation of a few hardware components. This is very useful for testing and debugging.
I actually think that having a 'real' OS on the phone is a big step. If you could see the code for the current OS used on most Motorola phones today, you would appreciate what a step forward going to Linux really is.