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."

Comments

Re:Push to talk?

[rathehun]

Well, India for one. The large phone companies - Hutchisson, Orange and Airtel all provide Push-to-talk.

Re:Push to talk?

[m_member]

They are closed, proprietary protocols. The future of PTT is PoC/PAG as defined by the OMA.

PoC - Push to Talk Over Cellular
PAG - Presence & Group Management
OMA - Open Mobile Alliance

TLA overload :-S

Push-to-talk

[myspys]

I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering what this is, so help yourselves:

Push to walk at Wikipedia.

Re:Push-to-talk

[Myself]

It's a giant leap backward in communications. Half-duplex means there's no way to interrupt a rag-chewer. You know the old comedian's line "stop me if you've heard this one"? Sabotaged by PTT!

I hate not being able to hear the listener's reactions as I'm talking. No sigh, no laugh, no "what?", leaves me without crucial tidbits of information that are so essential to human communication.

Furthermore, PTT doesn't include a way to leave a message if the victim doesn't answer. Most implementations even use a separate numbering space, so knowing someone's phone number doesn't tell you their PTT number, and vice versa.

What's ironic is that the original motivation behind PTT (the benefits of statistical multiplexing) doesn't even hold true anymore, because cellphone codecs are so good at compressing the quiet side of a conversation, you get almost the same efficiency with a full-duplex call as you do with the horrible PTT.

The typical implementation of PTT as speakerphone is just poor etiquette on the seller's part. It works the same with the regular earpiece instead of the loudspeaker, but holding the phone is infinitely more awkward because you have to press the damn button.

Stronger?

[dawhippersnapper]

I'm really happy that the technology is progressing, but I wished they'd progress some in making these expensive phones out of expensive less breakable materials. Maybe some of that aluminum glass over the LCD? In the past couple of years I've bought two expensive phones that both had LCD damage that warranty didn't cover once shipped back.

Market Share

[putko]

Symbian is the dominant OS. Linux is second.
Something Called "Windows" is in there too.
Here is the article

I'm confused though -- are the Symbian phones not feature rich compared to Linux? I figured that was the whole point; it has better phone features (power management?). I'm guessing that the article is trumpeting Linux's success when it isn't exactly warranted (but at least it is kicking Windows ass).

Re:Market Share

[Eric Giguere]

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)

Re:Market Share

[LaughingCoder]

Having done cellphone development for quite a few years, I can attest to the difficulty in developing for Symbian. The tools are buggy, and no 2 Symbian phones are the same - we had a different executable for each and every model. The Microsoft phones were much better to develop for. The tools were free and quite good. And we ran the same executable on every Microsoft-based phone, including both Smartphones (non-stylus button phones) and Pocket PC derivatives (stylus/touch screen). Further, we had the luxury of building and testing the exact same source tree on the desktop, which really accelerated development.

All of that said, I think Linux could pretty quickly dominate the mobile space. I have done some embedded Linux development and it has many of the attributes of the Microsoft environment (good tools, lots of "sample" code, ability to do parallel desktop builds). And since Linux has a much smaller footprint the phones can be cheaper, which will help with adoption. Now hopefully the phone vendors will standardize on a common API so the poor application developers don't have to create a separate install package for every model. Unfortunately, past history is not very encouraging in this regard.

Re:Market Share

[yourexhalekiss]

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?

Re:Push to talk?

[bazorg]

All 3 mobile telecoms here in Portugal do. Every now and then they make TV ads with real life situations where they imagine people would use it.

What's the advantage?

[Dr.Sweety]

Disclaimer: this is NOT a flamebait, I'm a Linux user and Opensource fan!
I was wondering why they actually use Linux on a mobilephone. Linux is open - which is great - but isn't the GNU license pretty unattractive for something as closed as a mobile phone? I mean the mobile phone companies and providers probably have no interest in opening the source and thus making it available to the competition and allowing people to easily hack the phone.
I would be really interested why a mobile phone company should choose Linux over something like Symbian (or even Windows Mobile :) which of course costs license fee but on the other hand is a very customised plattform for mobile phone devices.

Re:What's the advantage?

[fireboy1919]

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.

Brings new meaning to....

[Shakes268]

Is that a penguin in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

Possible because geeks can't assemble them

[bogaboga]

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.

Re:Push to talk?

[torpor]

its useful for when you don't need to have a full-blown fire-up/tear-down conversation, and only need to use the cell phone to provide info/updates.

its good for taxi companies, for example; they just outfit their cabbies with cell phones with this feature, and one of their traditionally biggest expenses [airtime] is now cheap as pie.

i for one welcome these new 'communication modes' that our machines are forcing upon us. maybe we'll all get along.

Re:Push to talk?

[ajs318]

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.

Microsoft Smartphone All the way baby

[frankcow]

I'm a fan of Linux as well. But I gotta say, M$ has done a great job on smartphone, and has made it incredibly easy to program for it. Not to mention the interop with the most popular OS in the world...