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Why Linux Is Good For Low-End Smartphones

Posted by samzenpus on from the i've-never-needed-more dept.

jfruhlinger writes "Nokia's announcement that it was developing a Linux distro for low-end smartphones, shortly after abandoning the Linux-based Meego OS for Windows Phone 7, was a little puzzling. But it actually makes good business sense in the smartphone world. While WP7 aims for the high end, there's a market for cheaper and less complex phones that still beat boring old feature phones, especially in emerging economies. And, unlike Symbian and the heavily tweaked Meego, Linux can be quickly and cheaply brought to market as a low-end smartphone OS."

4 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Here's hoping by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I would love to see a very small version of Linux on a smartphone. Think kernel less than 1MB (less than 500kB ideally), and a very lightweight graphical library. This could easily be made to boot in under 5 seconds and run on put-put hardware. I've done it myself with a system with pretty old Arm v5 at 300MHz, with 32MB RAM and 64MBytes of ROM it's capable or running a lot of goods - certainly any simple smartphone task.

    I wish them luck!

    1. Re:Here's hoping by Rob+the+Bold · · Score: 3, Informative

      What you have described is a feature phone, which these days tend to run Nucleus and not Linux.

      I don't think he's quite described the end product so thoroughly as to be able to make that distinction between "smart phone" and "feature phone". Or at least I wouldn't feel like I could make that call without a little more information.

      --
      I am not a crackpot.
  2. Android is better by brainzach · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If a phone manufacturer wants to make a low end smart phone, Android is the way to go. It comes with a huge app ecosystem, more polished and cheaper to implement than any new Linux solution. I don't see how anything Nokia produces can compete with a $150 Android phone.

    Nokia is probably only considering Linux after they realized that WP7 does not scale down to low end smart phones. They are covering up poor strategic decisions.

  3. Re:And Symbian S40? by randomlogin · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why not just keep updating/upgrading S40?

    Short answer - because Nokia senior management have now completely lost the plot. Symbian is still a much better option at the low end because underneath all the shiny stuff is an RTOS designed specifically to run on resource constrained devices. Proper real time capabilities were baked into the current Symbian kernel specifically so that a single processor could be used for both the protocol stack and the applications. As someone pointed out earlier, other vendors pay good money to use proprietary RTOS platforms like Nucleus for their low end phones because they deliver the same benefits.

    Putting a full Linux workstation in your pocket in the form of the N950 is cool - and I wish they'd let me buy one. But this is a different market, and it's not one where using Linux makes a hell of a lot of sense.