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Linux Crashes the Mobile Party
superglaze writes "ZDNet.co.uk has a fairly comprehensive feature on the progress being made by Linux for cellphones. Seems a pretty consumer deal for now, but there are some interesting hints of Linux eventually challenging Windows Mobile and Symbian in business use. The article also seems to suggest that the two big groups pushing mobile Linux could be amenable to a merger due to common interests."
The year of Linux on the deskt...Cell Phone?
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
"Linux Mobile (LiMo) Foundation and the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS)"
Limo and Lips sounds like the name for a private escort service.. I can see these guys going far in the industry!
which is totally what she said
I havent read TFA but Jon Stokes at arstechnica.com has a quite enthusiastic review on Intel's new 45nm mobile processor. He foresees standard x86 operating systems (windows or linux) running even on am/fm radios :P
Intel's x86 ISA grows down: today laptops, tomorrow the iPhone.
This might speed-up the development of the wanted-by-all linux (smart)phone...
The OpenMoko platform is looking like a good bet for a Linux-based phone/pda platform. ARM-based, iPhone-like touchscreen and a nice development kit available. It's due in Oct/Nov I beleve.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
For one thing I can't really see how Linux falls down on being "rich enough to deliver applications", and his other points just seem to show that Linux doesn't yet have much market penetration in the mobile market. While this is true, slamming it for that in an article about the Linux entry into the mobile market seems odd. I guess maybe it's just a poorly chosen quote by the author.
When I can easily sync my linux/wm5/symbian/whatever OS phone to my linux desktop wake me. These are just going to be more linux phones that sync with windows desktop easily but on the linux desktop require using some poorly documented library that may or may not work on the current version of your phone. Then IF your phone happens to work with said library/module you are going to have to edit all sorts of config files and PRAY that your phone is actually recognized. After all this you better hope that your mail client, calendar, and contact manager of choice work with said library.
I've said this before on slashdot and I know I will be modded troll so enjoy.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
A little over a year ago I dropped almost $700 on an ipaq hw6945. I had visions of carrying around a computer in my pocket in place of where my phone used to be. This just is not the case. The network stack on this thing sucks - hard. Using terminal software and/or browsing the internet is excruciating. I basically never do it. I desperately want a choice that isn't Windows Mobile. Perhaps I'd come back at some point, but I doubt it. As it stands I have a really excellent text-messenger and a pretty crappy phone. Almost none of the capabilities of this thing are being used do to a ghastly interface and limited product selection.
I dream of being able to run Linux on this thing... and have it actually work, of course. I just checked handhelds.org again this morning, and this still wasn't the case. Frankly, I don't really see community effort ever coming back around to my device. Not at least as a phone with camera and GPS, etc. I do dream of some larger organization, e.g. Ubuntu, taking a stab at this some day...
I'm the biggest nerd in the world, I know, but at least I'm in the right place.
I remember running Linux in '93, Slackware 3.0. Amazing how far we've come, but this step could not have been imagined back when I began. Our little penguin is now going mobile!
The Cell Phone will become ubiquious in ways computers never could be. Even laptops don't get into places you will find phones.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
You can do that and much more with an Openmoko-phone http://openmoko.org/. Admittedly the software still needs quite some time to mature but it definitely will open great opportunities.
Phones running as web servers? Phones serving files to a house? Phones-as-firewalls?
Dare I say it, a Beowulf cluster of phones?
I'm a bit more cynical about Linux than I used to be, but I still think I'd feel a little thrill if I saw a bash prompt on my phone. I actually quite wanted one when I was doing my PhD. I could use ssh to start a big job running and monitor its progress even when away from the lab. I could even set it up to ring me when it was finished, or when it had halted at some critical moment.
It would also get many, many geek points when people see you fiddling with your phone in the pub:
"Are you texting?"
"No, I'm restarting a simulation of liver behaviour on a cluster in the basement at Imperial College"
Peter
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there aren't enough people who both want a smart-phone and have bought into the Linux ideology to sustain a single Linux-based smart-phone. That's not to say that such a phone couldn't be successful, just that the selling point can't be "it's got Linux!"
What are the real selling points of a smart-phone?
* The applications
* The development environment (promise of new, better apps soon)
* Linking to other devices (syncing)
* The interface
* The phone functions
Apple have just sewn up the interface, everyone gets the phone functions pretty much right, syncing is okay generally (non-Windows phones are hurt by closed Exchange servers), most people do apps reasonably well and the dev environment is okay for some, not so hot for others (Apple).
How will a Linux smart-phone distinguish itself from the pack? It's no longer enough to be as good as the rest. These phones have to be much better. Maybe the better APIs and adherence to standards will be enough. It won't win the 'cool' factor that we saw the iPhone blitz just recently, but maybe it'll be enough.
I'd like to see more sizzle to help sell the sausage.
I already have my Linux mobile device, and I couldn't be happier with it. It attaches to my bluetooth headphones, keyboard, gps, and phone (DUN) without any problems. I can use xterm to ssh to my server, or stream internet radio or video at work. Oh yea, and I jammed 16GB of SDHC storage into the thing, so I have a decent music selection. The current version does not have a cell phone radio, but the next one will carry a WiMax chip, and possibly some other new hardware goodies.
On a related note, Ubuntu's Moblin and Red Flag's Midinux will be out relatively soon for use on UMPCs and MIDs. So, I'd agree that things are looking up for those of us who want more than e-mail and pim on our mobile devices. I'm not sure that I care *as much* about having Linux on my cell phone, as long as it will act as a modem to my other device and make phone calls. I want them to be separate, mostly so that I can make sure not to kill the battery on the cell phone, just in case I actually need it.
One of the more interesting developments following the release of the Sun UltraSPARC T1 & T2 chipsets under the GPL has been the S1, a single core implementation of the T1, which combined some other other GPLed hardware can be built as a RISC based system on a chip. It has massive potential as a powerful, low wattage processor that could compete with ARM and Intel in the portable device marketplace. It might be a couple of years in the future but I think it has the potential to be a competitor. It should run Solaris and BSD as well as Linux.
"Well thurs your problem!"
The funny thing about articles like this is there are always "experts" crying about shortcomings in Linux, yet the people actually making the phones are going toward Linux. In reality their criticisms don't hold enough weight to actually discourage the Linux train from rolling. I have recently begun to make the observation that people who actually develop for and use Linux don't have the same concerns as the analysts. Analysts cry "fragmentation", however in the actual Linux community it really isn't a problem. I've yet to run into the developer that says "oh man, I'm going to have to recode so much of this app for Ubuntu from Red Hat. This is going to suck...". Or what about the user "I've used Red Hat before but this Ubuntu is so damn confusing to get used to". The people that seem to criticize the most seem to have the least amount of Linux experience and form their opinions mostly on hearsay.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
On a phone?
The UI on a Linux phone is very unlikely to resemble any existing Linux desktop any more than the iPhone GUI resembles Aqua.
There's plenty of space for a phone with a UI that has more depth than an iPhone, and more consistency than Windows Mobile. I've just dumped my iMate JasJam for a Sony Ericsson M600i, and it was like taking a breath of fresh air. Symbian/UIQ is much more rational than Windows CE, but I'd still prefer an OS I could customise, and the form factor of the M600 isn't as useful as the iMate.
For me, a Linux phone would be the best of both worlds. If there were any available, I'd have one in my pocket now.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Windows mobile is the biggest sham ever. There, I said it. Lemme explain...
At my job everyone used to have blackberrys w/ Nextel. Their data network at the time sucked big time (may or may not still be the case). So as the phones aged and everyone got tired of Nextel, we switched to Cingular. I'm not 100% sure why we changed the phones, but a few Windows guys started looking at Windows Mobile based phones. The key features for this were suppose to be
* Since it's Windows, there is a huge array of applications
* Since it has Internet Explorer, we can use all of our websites and IE quirks
* Since it's Windows and windows has a standard API, our windows programmers could write programs for it
* Basically every advantage you can think of for a full blown version of Windows compacted into a phone
Well we got them. Started using them. Crash. But not a normal crash. Remember, these are phones. So you'd spend the whole morning wondering why you haven't gotten any calls yet and it turns out the phone froze. This is completely unacceptable for a phone. I got used to checking my phone every hour to make sure it didn't need to be rebooted.
But heck, rebooting a phone every once in awhile isn't a huge deal to be able to use almost every Windows application ever! Out of all the smartphone OS's I've dealt with, in reality, Windows Mobile has the least amount of quality applications available for it. A lot of standard things everyone did on the Blackberry's were lost simply because there was no Windows Mobile equivalent program. It turns out most developers have no interest in porting their apps to Windows Mobile. Why not? Well this brings me to the next point...
We've had these phones 2 years, and not a single one of our Windows developers has written a program for it. Why? Because touting it as anything like regular Windows development is a flat out lie. Writing programs for a mobile phone is nothing like a traditional application. They couldn't use many/most of their normal development tools. Writing for limited hardware is a whole different ballpark. Microsoft tried to take their traditional developers and throw them into the mobile phone arena, and those developers simply aren't equipped to do it, and get discouraged and don't write anything for the platform.
Every advantage that relied on the fact "it's basically Windows" went right out the window because, in reality, it's nothing like desktop versions of Windows. We were left with an experience that was significantly worse than the Blackberry's. So guess what? We're getting rid of thousands of dollars worth of phones because the experience truly is that bad. We're going back to Blackberry.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I find the following quote from the article quite misleading:
"Imagine I'm an IT manager contemplating standardising on a mobile platform. I want something rich enough to deliver applications, that's available from multiple manufacturers, offering a decent range of handsets with corporate features. Linux just falls down on all of those."
The point of "that's available from multiple manufacturers", while a very valid point, surely linux is the only one that really is available from multiple manufacturers.
With symbian or windows mobile, you may be able to get the hardware from multiple vendors, but your stuck with a single vendor for the software. With linux, as the article states, there are at least 2 groups pushing mobile linux, and multiple hardware manufacturers also rolling their own.
The freedom of being able to buy your hardware from multiple vendors doesn't is far less of an advantage if you only have one vendor to buy the software from, whereas the freedom to obtain both hardware and software from multiple vendors is a huge benefit to the purchaser.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
in 1999, they were saying that Linux would never amount to owning more than 1% of internet servers by 2005. And at that time, Linux was already one of the dominant players
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
> Call me what you will a BES set up is still really easy if all you need it for is email/calendar/contact sync from a corp standing
Do you *want* to be devoured by grammar nazis?
I strongly disagree. While I think phone UIs tend to be far from perfect and agree there's a lot of room for improvement, they're usable. I can start a phone call in a few seconds, sometimes a lot quicker than that.
I think the main problems with today's phones are:
- Trustworthiness. How do I know the mic isn't on and transmitting to someone? (That's not hypothetical anymore; we know it actually happens; theoretical risks are becoming reality.) Why are my conversations still unencrypted in 2007? that's ridiculous. Most of my time spent on my phone is talking with people I regularly meet in the real world. There's just no reason we shouldn't have a nice, big OTP, and PKs for fallback whenever the OTP runs out.
- Lock-in and closedness. Why do I have to pay to get a ringtone onto this thing? (Not that I want my phone to make annoying noises, but there's a principle at stake here.) Why will my phone stop working if I put another network's SIM chip into it? Why do some people have to pay to get photographs that they took, out of their own device?
- Lack of connectivity options. If I'm near a 802.11 network, I should be able to (optionally) use that (perhaps at the cost of more power) for my side of the network connection, instead of the more expensive cell networks. If I'm near the person I'm calling (e.g. "hey, where the hell in this huge building are you?") I should be able to directly link w/out going through anyone's network at all. As long as phone manufacturers and network providers have such a close relationship, we're not going to get these features, no matter how obvious and desirable they are.
Having our phones run Free Software is a really big deal. I think it matters even more on phones, than it does on desktop personal computers. We need these devices to start serving the interests of the users, instead of the network providers, governments, and who-the-fuck-knows-else.As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You can use kagu music player that works with a2dp bluetooth audio. I don't know about headsets (for voip), haven't really been too interested in that, although I know that it's coming. Sound quality is very good with a2dp, and avrcp (remote control) works fairly well with kagu too.
Actually the OpenMoko (aka FIC Neo1973) has the following new additions to hardware on the upcoming Consumer Edition (aka GTA02):
* 802.11 b/g WiFi
* Samsung 2442 SoC
* SMedia 3362 Graphics Accelerator
* 2 3D Accelerometers
* 256MB Flash
* 1700mAh Battery
* Faster CPU - S3C2442/400
* LEDs illuminating the two buttons.
Do you really need a multi-touch screen? Not really. Maybe if you want to sit there and play video games... but that's the only practical use I can see in it.
Most people who are looking at purchasing an OpenMoko phone, are not looking for flashy high-speed bullshit. We want something we can actually use. Most of us are hackers, and that is the need this phone is trying to fill. I want a phone I can build a simple app on for simple things. I'm sorry, but the only reason the iPhone has such high-end hardware, is because it requires the resources for it's bloated software.
Please, for the love of 'steve', quit trolling.