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Two New Linux Phones to Ship in Japan
An anonymous reader writes "Japan's largest mobile carrier has announced two new Linux phones with support for push-to-talk, multiple numbers, and other advanced features. Of the six models models in NTT DoCoMo's new 902i-series, the two running embedded Linux are made by NEC and Panasonic, who have been collaborating on a Linux-based software platform for 3G mobile phones. The NEC-manufactured N902i boasts a four megapixel camera, while the Panasonic-made P902i aims to appeal to music lovers, with music jukebox software and an available 1GB MiniSD card. Between these and Motorola's Linux mobile phones, Linux seems to be doing well in Asia, in the rapidly growing feature-phone space, which is projected to comprise the majority of global mobile phone shipments by 2010."
Symbian is not the easiest OS to write for. Also, Symbian is dominated by Nokia, who bought out Motorola's share a couple of years back (which allowed Motorola to work on developing Microsoft Smartphone devices). See the Wikipedia entry for Symbian OS for more. Over time, I'm sure the power management features of Linux phones will be just as sophisticated.
Eric
BlackBerry programming information (speaking of non-Symbian)
thus making it available to the competition and allowing people to easily hack the phone.
I don't think manufacturers would mind that at all. Would you mind if a competing manufacturer bought your phone at retail only to change the OS and sell it at what they paid you+some profit?
You don't think that phone manufacturers don't know how their competition's phones work, do you? They all use commodity parts. The chips that they're using are well documented, and for DSPs, an assembly call can be almost as involved as a function call; reversing is fairly trivial (and serves almost no purpose since the chips are well documented).
What you really want to have an edge over the competition is the ability to swap out parts of your code base really fast to fit with whatever the latest chip to come along is so that you can beat your competitors to the market with the new models. With linux's support of many devices it is an ideal choice for this.
Of course, if you do foolishly decide to make some ASICs, you can write your own kernel module and install it alongside. Linux is quite compatible with that.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
NEC and Panasonic can think of shipping these phones because geeks cannot easily assemble these phones from legacy parts. If this ever becomes possible, NEC and Panasonic will jump ship on the effort, just like other OEMs in the computer world. That's one of the reasons why it's very hard to find a Linux-ready and loaded notebook.
What does a "linux-powered" mobile phone mean, actually? How different is embedded linux from what I'm running on my computer right now? Basically, what I'm tryin to ask is,
Could I hook one of these up to my SuSE box with way less problems than I would have with a phone with another OS?
As I remember, push-to-talk was how early two-way radios worked. The same circuit would act as a receiver or -- at the push of a button -- a transmitter. The same frequency was used for speech in both directions. The advent of cheap transistors with a few MHz of bandwidth led to cheap two-way radios being marketed as kids' toys. They were probably illegal as hell; but then, the batteries would barely last long enough for The Authorities to find anyone using them.
The very early VHF mobile phones {where you actually had to dial a different STD code, depending on the approximate location of the called party} were half-duplex, using a push-to-talk button embedded in a normal telephone handset {so more like a squeeze-to-talk}. Later VHF mobiles were still half-duplex, but used to autodetect a signal in the mic.
We have had full-duplex mobile voice calling for ages, so this seems like a backward step to me. Almost nobody uses a mobile phone for voice anyway in the UK, because it canes your credit.
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