Intel and LG Team Up For x86 Smartphone

gbjbaanb writes "I love stories about new smartphones; it shows the IT market is doing something different than the usual same-old desktop apps. Maybe one day we'll all be using super smartphones as our primary computing platforms. And so, here's Intel's offering: the LG GW990. Running a Moorestown CPU, which gives 'considerably' better energy efficiency than the Atom, it runs Intel's Linux distro — Moblin. Quoting: 'In some respects, the GW990 — which has an impressive high-resolution 4.8-inch touchscreen display — seems more like a MID than a smartphone. It's possible that we won't see x86 phones with truly competitive all-day battery life until the emergence of Medfield, the Moorestown successor that is said to be coming in 2011. It is clear, however, that Intel aims to eventually compete squarely with ARM in the high-end smartphone market."

Comments

Re:Advantages...

[Pentium100]

I want to run desktop PC applications on my smartphone.

I now have a Nokia N93 which is quite old and may not have all of the features of a new phone (or rather new version of Symbian OS).

It can open MS Office files, but really mangles them - shows only text, no graphics, no formatting and cannot edit the files. This is not because the phone has too little memory - it has 22MB free when booted up. MS Office 97 works on a PC that has 16MB RAM total.
I want to watch videos on my phone, but it only supports a very specific format - mp4 container, xvid or x264 codec at specific max bitrates and resolution (compatible with iPod), which means that I cannot just copy a video file to the memory card, I have to convert it first, and converting takes time. On x86 smartphone I could install codecs, filters and splitters to, for example, support mkv container. Or ogg format for audio.
There are less programs available for my phone than my PC, also, there are a lot of free (open or closed source) programs for PC, while their counterparts for the phone may be expensive.
Also, if the phone had x86 and Windows, I could use PC hardware with it (for example - mouse, keyboard, USB flash memory...).

As for the power issues, I think it would be possible to have two modes of operation. A phone mode, where the x86 cpu is turned off and some other CPU is used for the basic phone functions (calls, SMS, camera) and a full mode when the xd86 CPU is used for everything. The phone may not be able to work for very long in this mode (a few hours), but I would rather carry a small power adapter or a spare battery than a netbook in addition to my phone.

I have a Psion Series 5mx PDA, which is great, but has compatibility problems, for example, while I can browse the internet (using infrared connection to my phone) and download MS Word documents, I have to also have a laptop to convert them to the Psion format. But if I already have my laptop, why would I also carry the Psion?
I once installed an emulator that could emulate an 8086 CPU and installed Windows 3.10. I would have used it like this, if it wasn't so slow (Psion 5mx was made in 1999 and has an ARM 710T 36.864MHz CPU). Maybe with modern CPUs this emulation could be possible and maybe I could even run Windows for Workgroups 3.11...

Re:What for ?

[bhtooefr]

OK, how about drivers for, say, RedHat 6.0 (or, rather, the kernel and XFree86 versions included in that ancient version of RedHat)?

And that's newer than Windows 3.1 by quite a lot.

The reason why older OSes are poorly supported is that they're older, and nobody uses them any more. The strongest exceptions I can think of are actually in the closed source realm - mainframe software, which gets virtualized, and Windows XP.

Re:What for ?

[bhtooefr]

What if that newer hardware has closed source drivers?

I guess you could write a shim to use the newer drivers, but that gets to be a pain.

And, Windows 3.1 has public APIs for drivers and doesn't handle filesystem access - it just calls DOS for that, and there are DOS filesystem drivers for quite a few filesystems (and a few different DOS variants from multiple vendors, including Microsoft, that natively handle FAT32, including an open source DOS clone.)

Re:Needs to be open no APP store lock / sim locks

[BitZtream]

First off, Android isn't impressing anyone, don't try that crap.

The other two are used on more phones by more companies and have been around longer they have bigger groups that enjoy them.

If you watch the trends however, its not staying that way.

iPhone won't be the top smart phone, they aren't trying to be. But it IS massively popular.

I did vote with my wallet, and I don't care if I have root on my phone, I want it to work, not dick around with it and have it break in the middle of a call. Contrary to popular belief most people could give a fuck about that sort of thing, even if the very disconnected from reality slashdot crowd yells loudly about it.