Consortium Tackles Linux Mobile Phone Standards

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com is running an article stating that ten companies have recently banded together to launch a cross-industry consortium to further advance embedded Linux platforms. They hope to make 'Linux into a plug-and-play mobile phone platform comparable to Microsoft's Windows Mobile Smartphone OS, but with greater flexibility and lower costs. The LiPS (Linux Phone Standard) Forum intends to help make Linux a more standardized, interoperable mobile phone OS.' Meanwhile, some market research suggests that Linux is already giving Windows Mobile a run for its money."

Comments

Hurray!

[LaughingCoder]

This will be a boon to mobile application developers! Symbian is basically controlled by one vendor - Nokia, and Windows Mobile obviously is controlled by Microsoft. Both OSes have their advantages and their problems. Symbian typically requires a unique executable to be built for every device. Windows needs a *slightly* beefier hardware platform (8MB minimum). Tools-wise Windows is in much better shape than Symbian. Embedded Linux could give both a run for their money. It will offer better tools (by far) than Symbian - almost on a par with Windows tools most likely -- and it will offer lighter resource requirements than Windows. The smart phone vendors should be all over this. It will be really interesting to see how Nokia reacts given their tremendous investment in, and control of, Symbian.

Re:Well, duh.

[ozmanjusri]

MS's marketing will be sure to push the first option, but common sense really makes the second pretty damn attractive.

You'd think so, but over here in Australia, I can't buy a Linux smartphone. I've looked around, phoned around and done everything short of getting on my knees and begging, but no-one will sell them.

I've ended up getting a Pocket PC phone - the iMate Jam. http://www.clubimate.com/t-DETAILS_JAM.aspx It's good as a phone, and compact enough not to get in the way. I'm a long-time Palm user, so the Pocket PC interface seems cramped and oddly inconsistent, but it's usable. I bought it as a development platform, but I can cross-compile my Palm apps, so there's nothing much to learn there.

I'd like to add a Linux smartphone to my list of supported platforms, but even if I tracked down one to develop on, my customers couldn't buy them here. Has anyone in Australia actually managed to persuade a vendor to part with one?

Re:too many GEEKS

[LiquidCoooled]

The biggest problem I have seen with Linux is its too specific.
I have seen wonderful one shot solutions to numerous problems, ranging from a simple shell script to full applications.
Every single problem appears to have 10x different alternative variations on the solution.

If OSS people could work together and specify their problems and develop a general solution to the problem at hand, then linux will work for the masses.

People just don't want to "try before they buy" or "find the best one that suits you" for 16 different word processors, they want to get the one that will do the job. They don't want to have to worry about the distro choice because all software marked "Linux compatible" should work on it (without worrying about RPM TGZ and however many upyourarse variations there may be).

I have been examining Ubuntu rather closely recently and whilst I like what it offers, I'm still a newbie and find it confusing to examine projects - I can get things from my synaptic installer and I can add repositories to make more things available, but I still can't suss out how to go to the applications' homepage and download/run a single package - from a Windows perspective, I have come to trust the programs more when I can download them directly from the authors homepage, I don't like to get from secondary sources.

I realise theres probably a really simple super whizzbang command line sequence to do it and I've gone down along this route and looked into things like alien (for bringing in rpms), but why the hell is there such a conflict between packages, its all for Linux afterall.

When I'm in Linux I feel like I'm operating a betamax.

hear hear

[samjam]

I second this; I did Smartphone 2002/2003 work for Orange for a couple of years.

I was very busy, and every now and then I had a go on symbian only to get "wth? Now what?"; the whole symbian thing was an incomplete model of a cut-down psion3 system, which made sense in the psion3 but not a symbian phone. Anyway, I never got very far in the little time I didn't have. Never mind "dip a toe in" with symbian you had to nearly drown before you could get anywhere.

Smartphone on the other hand was a doddle, there was no more to "know" than made sense, the tools were readily available and logical; the api's happened to be familiar (from my windows delphi days) and it really wasn't very hard to get going, not to mention the convenient emulators.

There are lots of smart symbian developers out there and I don't want to comment on whether or not they are smarter then me :-) but I bet they would find smartphone easier to manage.

Having said all that the real hard thing with smartphone was getting technical details out of microsoft, how many times I wished I had "the source", so linux phones, with the well designed base system would be a real boon.

Sam