VMware's Dual OS Smartphone Virtualization Plan Firms Up

Sharky2009 writes "VMware is developing virtualisation for smartphones which can run any two OSes — Windows Mobile, Android or Linux — at once. The idea is to have your work applications and home applications all running insider their own VMs and running at the same time so you can access any app any time. VMware says: 'We don't think dual booting will be good enough — we'll allow you to run both profiles at the same time and be able to switch between them by clicking a button,' he said. 'You'll be able to get and make calls in either profile – work or home – as they will both be live at any given point in time.'" Also mentioned in February of this year, but now the company's announced a target of 2012 for mass production.

Comments

Re:Why?

[master5o1]

Why not?

Re:great, so my phone can be even slower

[w0mprat]

How android works is analogous to a virtual machine already. If you've rooted your Android phone you don't really have full root access to what runs underneath the Linux variant.

My phone is smart because it runs a Linux distro that allows for root access when required.

The linux you have root too is really running a layer above the the radio software etc. This is why rooting your 'droid is (reasonably) safe, you stilll don't get root to fsck with the fundamentals of the phone and bring down the local 3G network. On a side note, your user-level applications run in their own sandboxed userids and not the logged in the user as such. More to the point the application space runs in Java which has virtual machine like qualities and I can see many tricks possibly to get android running very nicely alongside anything else.

Oh and it's Linux too.

Android at least seems to be ripe for VMware to play with. The difficulty would be any non-linux/unix derived smartphone OS (ahem Windows mobile ahem).