The Rise of the Linux-Based Cellphone

mrscotty99 writes with a link to a Linux.com article about the rising star that is the Linux-based cellphone. Author Murry Shohat argues that the transformation of the cell into a mini-PC this summer is a landmark opportunity for Linux. Apple's offering and Motorola's US launch of the RAZR2 V8 (a linux-based device) may be heralds of great things to come for a new OS frontier: "In the cell phone market, consumers will pay for content, and corporations need to deliver secure content to applications in the palm of employees' hands. These trends suggest products that are simultaneously more functional and less expensive than a Treo or BlackBerry and more secure than an iPhone. MontaVista Software claims to have deployed Mobilinux on more than 35 million mobile devices worldwide. CEO Tom Kelley says, 'Linux is growing rapidly on mobile devices because of its solid reliability, its great flexibility, and because it accelerates the development cycle.' Vendors using or contemplating the use of Linux for mobile devices unanimously point to the operating system's footprint, memory usage, and fast growing ecosystem of developers producing software for graphics, multimedia, connectivity, and security." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge.

Comments

4 choices

[BadAnalogyGuy]

You don't have that many OS choices when developing a cellphone.

Obviously, you can go with a market leader like Symbian and Nokia's S60 software stack to get something out the door in a hurry.

Alternatively, you can pay a bunch up front to get the hardware working with Linux, but the benefits are a royalty-free OS license.

You could always ask Microsoft for some help, but your fast time to market and full-featureset come at the price of outrageously powerful hardware requirements.

Finally, you can go with BREW, Qualcomm's stripped-down, barebones OS.

Each OS has its benefits and tradeoffs. Linux's benefits are code "ownership" and full source access, not to mention a well-known API and a large pool of developers. The major tradeoff that I've seen is the enormous latency in normal usage. A keypress takes a significantly longer time to process on a Linux phone than on, say, a BREW phone or an MS Smartphone.

There's a lot of growth to come in the cellphone market, so Symbian has a long fight against these up and comers. And there really isn't anywhere for anyone (excluding Symbian) to go but up.

Re:4 choices

[Propaganda13]

You do know that Apple is entirely against everything you just said. Apple is part of the problem. Your post is like thanking Microsoft because the XBox was hacked to run Linux.

Now, the FIC NEO1973 will hopefully show the industry how it's done.

Apple's Offering?

[flydpnkrtn]

Apple's offering AFAIK is a mobile version of OSX... what does that have to do with Linux?

By my accounts, Apple has been hostile to the open source community. They take and don't give back. Look at their track record with OSX and not setting up a source repository.

Making iPods intentionally not work with anything but iTunes (which was cracked only days later)? Creating iWork instead of helping the OS X version OpenOffice.org?

Apple would BE Microsoft, and Charman Jobs would be Gates, if they had the option.

Don't forget about Qtopia

[rumith]

Personally I find this announcement much more interesting and relevant to the goal of getting Linux on the mobiles. In short: Trolltech has made available the telephony service, DRM and SaX available under GPLv2, thus making Qtopia Phone edition completely free. Besides, they have ported Qtopia to Neo 1973. This is most certainly very good news!

Re:The Neo 1973 is freer but has no wlan

[MichaelSmith]

The version to be released in October is supposed to have wireless networking.