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

Tux Racer

[Anonymous Coward]

I had better be able to play Tux Racer on these phones... otherwise, what good are they?

Well, duh.

[Slartibartfast]

C'mon. If you're an embedded developer, what're you going to (want to) go for? A closed-source, royalty-based model, or an open-source, royalty-free model -- especially wherein you're able to modify the kernel to your whim? MS's marketing will be sure to push the first option, but common sense really makes the second pretty damn attractive.

Re:Well, duh.

[NevDull]

The LiPS (Linux Phone Standard) Forum intends to help make Linux a more standardized, interoperable mobile phone OS.

Modifying the kernel to your whim isn't the intent of this consortium. Standardization is. You appear to have missed the point of LiPS.

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:Well, duh.

[LaughingCoder]

It's not quite as "duh" as you might think. I did mobile application development for 3 years on Windows (and I also did some embedded Linux and a tiny bit of Symbian and BREW) and I can attest that the Windows platform is far and away the most advanced from an application developer's perspective. The tools are excellent (and free, I might add) and the added benefit of being able to do most of my development on a Windows desktop target (yes, the same source built and ran for a Windows XP desktop, a Pocket PC, and a Smartphone) was a tremedous productivity boost. That said, when I did my embedded Linux work I was also able to do functional development on a desktop, so I think Linux will give Windows a run for its money in this space. And of course, access to the source code is gravy. You just can't appreciate how painful device-based development can be relative to desktop development until you experience it firsthand. Symbian (and Microsoft) both offer emulators which are helpful, but in my experience they fall far short of the advantages that derive from actually developing the code in a desktop environment.

I'll save you all the hassle...

[Zouden]

"why oh why can't I just get a phone that works as a phone?!"
There, hopefully that'll stop this discussion from having 80% comments like this...

Re:too many GEEKS

[meringuoid]

Apple, based on Linux, is the hottest os in the world.

OSX is based on BSD.

linux

[akhomerun]

i didn't realize how huge linux was in the smartphone market. i figured it was all between windows mobile and symbian.

i can see standardizing mobile linux as being a very good thing for linux in that market.

maybe linux's lead isn't so large - the last link in the article, when you read through it, points out that the data does not inlclude phones/pdas running on microsoft's pocket PC edition of windows.

Symbian should be the target

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

Symbian should be the real target here. Mobile Windows is very resource hungry. An embedded Linux for mobile devices that is stingy with resources to conserve battery life would be a welcome addition.

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:Hurray!

[Anonymous Coward]

It will be really interesting to see how Nokia reacts given their tremendous investment in, and control of, Symbian.

http://www.maemo.org/?

Not likely to succeed from a feature perspective

[ostiguy]

... in the US, at least. Look at how Verizon Wireless cripples phones' feature sets. Was the ROKR's 100 song limitation resulting from Apple's desire to not have it compete with its Ipods, or was it the desire of the wireless carriers to not impact their ringtone business, or a little of both? I would not be surprised to see embedded linux being used to drive down device costs, but as a platform to provide new wireless features, it seems that time and time again, the U.S wireless carriers expect to extract fees.

The standardization on GSM in Europe and other places would seem to invite the possibility of a market where you bring your own phone (versus having it generally tied to a provider via a protocol), and this could foster new apps running on linux phones, but GPRS does not provide a lot of bandwidth to do interesting things.

I guess syncing PIM and email stuff is all well and good, but for new and inventive applications, I would not be too optimistic

ostiguy

Um, so it's low memory/lowcpu usage...

[Colin Smith]

Can I get it for my laptop? Seriously...

KDE/Gnome, Firefox, Thunderbird. Open Office. All huge.

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.

Re:The GPL Virus is the Problem.

[diegocgteleline.es]

After reviewing the GPL our lawyers advised us that any
products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to
its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.

What the hell are you talking about? Exactly what part of the GPL license makes your lawyers think that compiling code with gcc will force you to release the code under the GPL?

Either you need to change your lawyers or you're trolling. That stament is really, really stupid.

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