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VMware Promises Multiple OSs On One Cellphone
superglaze writes to tell us that VMware has announced a large effort behind their Mobile Virtualization Platform, promising the possibility of multiple operating systems on mobile devices. "The company described MVP as a 'thin layer of software' that will be embedded in handsets and 'be optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones.' Asked whether MVP would offer something different from the abstraction already provided by mobile Java, VMware's European product director Fredrik Sjostedt told ZDNet UK that MVP would require less recoding. 'If you want to have an application run on a Java-specific appliance, you need to code it for Java,' Sjostedt said. 'What we're introducing with MVP is an [embedded] abstraction layer below that, between the physical hardware and the software layer.'"
VMWare Promises Multiple OSs On One Cellphone
Just the other day I was having problems getting World of Warcraft working in Windows Mobile on my Heier Black Pearl Micro while at the same time using VMWare to host a wiki on a completely secure LAMP stack. Seriously guys, it's 2008--we've defeated our greatest fear (the polar bear) and we've elected an African American president--so why are cell phones still in the stone age? Is it really too much to ask for me to be able to play my favorite game and host some simple PHP pages while driving down the highway accepting incoming phone calls?
My work here is dung.
I saw a demo by Samsung a while back of their ARM port of Xen running multiple operating systems on a mobile phone. Not sure what the status of the technology is now, but they had some pretty nice ideas with the driver model and were talking about live-migrating your VM from your phone to your TV when you got home.
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Aside from the obvious technical hurtles (underpowered CPUs, insufficient memory, insufficient flash ROM to store multiple OSs, few user-installable mobile OSs with device-specific "plug'n'play" support, etc), there would seem to be one glaring obstacle... the carriers.
Lest anyone forget, the true customers for mobile devices are not individual consumers, but the carriers. And it is going to be a long time, if ever, before that will change. Indeed recent trends continue, if not increase, the extent of device-carrier lock-in, although often in more subtle ways that simply a software lock. The biggest trend is non-interoperable data services, either via authentication protocols that are carrier-specific, or simply spectrum differences (e.g. Tmobile's 3G bands are different than AT&T's or European 3G bands, even though all are considered "GSM").
So given this, why exactly would a carrier be interested in provide its customers with the ability to run multiple OSs on their mobile devices. And it is far more complicated from a technical and licensing standpoint than on a generic PC. Mobile OSs are not licensed by individual customers, and they are totally not set up to be installed on arbitrary mobile hardware. For example, a Palm 700p and a 700w are almost the same hardware, but it is not possible and no one has even tried to put PalmOS from the 700p on a 700w, or vice versa, WinMo from the 700w to a 700p. The only notable efforts in this vein are attempts to port Android to HTC WinMo devices (with marginal but possible future success). However that is only possible because Android is open source. And there is not obvious benefit to the carrier for doing this...
Indeed carriers, particularly Verizon (but all of them) generally try to restrict and remove features intrinsic to OEM devices (e.g. phone as modem features, WiFi, MMS, app suites like Pocket Office), in order to limit the individual customer's capabilities and force the carriers customers into specific "business models" for services (e.g. pay extra for phone as model, pay for data instead of free Wifi, etc). The freedom to run multiple OSs would necessarily give individual customers to circumvent these artificial, deliberate carrier-imposed restrictions -- something the carriers obviously would not want.
All in all sounds like a huge amount of work required with little upside for the real customers, i.e. the carriers. Until the wireless networks are truly "open access", with the power of device choice in the hands of consumers, not the carriers, the effort of multiple OSs seems doomed to failure...
The idea behind a VM isn't simply to run multiple OSes. That's just one benefit. Imagine behind able to transfer the entire state of your machine between different physical hardware. VMware can already do this with x86 machines with VMotion. How they're looking for possible wider applications. How about being able to transfer everything on your old phone to a new phone? Or how about backing up everything on the phone somewhere? Or if you work in IT for a large company, wouldn't it be nice for your users if the loaner Blackberry can be customized and always stay the same for the user no matter which physical device is assigned? Don't forget how limited the Internet's applications were when it was first started. Innovation can happen when we apply old ideas to new areas.
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You are using "virtualize" in the marketing sense. There is no good reason to virtualize the entire OS of a desktop machine just so that you can copy your documents and preferences to a cellphone and back. That's not using a sledgehammer instead of a flyswatter. It's building a fleet of space-tugs, sending them to the asteroid belt to bring back asteroids, and then dropping those asteroids from orbit onto the flies.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman