Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Motorola's Linux Phones Frustrate Developers

Posted by Zonk on Tue Feb 07, 2006 04:27 PM
from the play-nice-with-the-penguin dept.
Software Communications Linux
n8willis writes "Three years after Motorola first announced it was migrating its smart phones to Linux -- and a dozen models later -- there are still virtually no third-party applications for them, much less open source ones. Symbian and Microsoft both give away free SDKs to all willing developers, but Motorola seems to be putting up hurdles instead. An article on NewsForge asks why is this the case?" NewsForge is a Slashdot sister site.
+ -
story
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Motorola's Linux Phones Frustrate Developers 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.
  • It might be because most people that put linux on small things are people that want to show people that they can do l33t things and are not interested in writing serieus apps. but why doesn't motorola port some linux apps themselves? it shouldn't be to hard for them, and there are plenty of them.
    • I don't write apps to show off, I write them to make life convenient for me. Of course, in that case I don't sell them either, though I do often enough post code online.

    • Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Lumpy (12016)
      Or maybe it's because people make assumptions and dont read the Article to find out it's because Motorola intentionally is hampering development.

      Amazing things can be done with this phone. IF motorola released a tiny bit of onfo for the one interface they are keeping secret.

      They want you to do the java route and hide behind the lie that the mobile phone companies worry about security while Symbian and Microsoft encourage development for their platforms.

    • There are several reasons why Motorola might not want people inside these linux phones. For example:
      1.DRM. Allowing people inside could allow access to the secret key of the phone that is used to decrypt protected content.
      2.Featureset. Motorola might want to sell a phone with in it. This camera & chip might be physically capable of recording video but Motorola might decide to disable the feature on a particular phone for whatever reason (which might include wanting to sell a higher end phone with video
      • 1.DRM. Allowing people inside could allow access to the secret key of the phone that is used to decrypt protected content.

        so why bother with linux at all ? trying to ride da wave ?

        2.Featureset. Motorola might want to sell a phone with in it. This camera & chip might be physically capable of recording video but Motorola might decide to disable the feature...

        oh. i just hate companies that act like this. it seems like an advertisment for capitalism.

        3.Carriers. For example, Verizon might want Motorola to di

  • Not only developers frustrated (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07 2006, @04:34PM (#14663570)
    Those Linux phones would frustrate me too. Having to pipe AT commands directly from the command line to get them to dial, or use apt-get to manage contact details is fairly tedious.
  • I think one problem might be availability. Here in Europe, we CAN get exotic GSM phones, but you have to go to a specialty dealer. If you just walk into a mainstream electronics and home appliance shop or a cell phone booth you can't find any linux phones.

    The specialty dealers take a large profit off the phones since they don't sell that many of them. So nobody has one, you never hear about one so you never know you might actually want one.

    This, I think, is really too bad.

  • not surprised (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Keropipi (937851) on Tuesday February 07 2006, @04:36PM (#14663593)
    Motorola's UI department is seriously THE WORST in the industry. Having owned numerous Motorola phones I really think they need to stop hiring artists to design their phones and employ some UI engineers.
    • Agreed... actually, I don't think they have a single artist amongst them. I have the E398 [mobileburn.com] and while by and large I'm happy with it, especially after downloading tools to allow me to unload and upload anything I want onto it (including removing the ridiculously crap games that came with it and put on some proper ones)... its interface is indeed horrible.

      I don't think artists had anything to do with it... Sony Ericson, now they have interfaces that are attractive, obvious and easy to use... this thing has one

    • Fire the engineers and marketroids. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Brunellus (875635) on Tuesday February 07 2006, @05:24PM (#14664076) Homepage

      you have obviously not had the misfortune of having to use Sony/Ericsson's phones, ever.

      I have a T610. It's an OK phone, I guess, but there are a number of irritating quirks about it. For instance--there is no easily-discoverable sequence to the "received calls" list. Apparently, some genius thought that linear time is not relevant when considering whose calls you might have just missed. Unfortunately, since I don't live in an experimental piece of modernist fictional literature, I am left wondering who the hell called me and when.

      My general complaint with mobile phones is that they have suffered from two great evils: feature bloat and a fetish for miniaturization. My phone is tremendously useful on paper, but the complexity of its operation (for everything but regular phone calls) mean most of those features are essentially useles. Add this to the fact that its tiny size makes controlling it needlessly difficult.

      I blame the engineers who put the thing together. I also blame the marketing departments, who have compelled their engineers to fight a generally useless "button race," in the futile hope of being the most "full-featured" phone on the market.

      One thing I'll say about Nokia: they've been very good at UI. I might buy one of their phones, next.

    • "Motorola's UI department is seriously THE WORST in the industry. Having owned numerous Motorola phones I really think they need to stop hiring artists to design their phones and employ some UI engineers."

      Here's an example of Motorola UI foolishiness:

      If you leave a voice mail on my phone, two dialogs come up. The first says that I have a voicemail waiting. The one following it says "You missed a call from this number: ###-###-####" The first dialog has a 'call voicemail' button. If you press that and re
      • Also, it seems they create software that their hardware isn't comfortable running. Example, E398. The "mp3 phone". Play an mp3 on it - see it grind to a hault due to a lack of processing power. Hell, it can't even run the UI without encountering slow-down, what chance did the mp3 player have?
    • If they have such bad UI...why did you keep on buying them?

  • How is this unusual? (Score:5, Informative)

    by lifeisgreat (947143) on Tuesday February 07 2006, @04:37PM (#14663609) Homepage
    Knowledge-hoarding and incompetence from a big company? It's likely the move to Linux was made to either save money or as retribution from a manager/VP that was displeased with the previous supplier.

    Motorola's customers are NOT we end-users, but the phone companies that buy the phones and get people to sign up to contracts with them. Unless it's those companies kicking up a fuss, Motorola probably couldn't care less. Why should they? Motorola never sold a phone to an individual buyer, only to companies looking for features like locking the phone into a specific network.

  • This is because consumers are not the customer (Score:5, Insightful)

    by houstonbofh (602064) on Tuesday February 07 2006, @04:38PM (#14663623)
    The real customer is Verizon, or Voda, or whomever the cell provider is. And the providers want to sell the crap they make, not good and free alternatives.

    • Re:This is because consumers are not the customer (Score:5, Insightful)

      by garcia (6573) on Tuesday February 07 2006, @04:46PM (#14663714) Homepage
      Yup and in addition...

      The big question is, what does Motorola gain by obstructing willing developers from bringing software to their platform?

      Well, it keeps the development in the hands of the mobile phone companies using the phone who then will charge their customers to download songs, applications, etc. If they phone is wide open and anyone can develop for it why would anyone pay $2.50/song, $5 to $10/application, etc?

      Exactly, they wouldn't and that's why phones with great development environments (like the T-mobile Sidekick) are dead in the water.

      • "If they phone is wide open and anyone can develop for it why would anyone pay $2.50/song, $5 to $10/application, etc?"

        That's true, as far as it goes, but consider an alternative approach: Why not give up a little on the apps and services side of the thing, and make buckets of money by selling gazillions of the devices because people can do more with your phone?

        I suspect if they did a proper business case, they'd find, much as Apple has with the iPod, that it's not necessary to sell every little thing t

      • And you wonder why the Europeans and asias have bletooth ad more advaced phones than here in the us?

        I would't be surprissed if the telecom moopolies are the cause of this. Like yo said they wat to sell apps through their service and make moey off it Free software and inovation gets in the way of profits.

        Verizon would live drmed phoes that can only run software they approve.. oh wait they already do that?
    • And that right there's my problem with convergence. The phone companies monkey with the platform so they can sell you bells and whistles.

  • Anyone ever use/own a motorola phone? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anyone who has ever owned or used a motorola phone, has to know that their software is horrible. I think this is a good situation where it may help to actually replace their entire software development team with people who are competent? Or else I (and many like me) will never consider buying a motorola.

  • In a word (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jordan Catalano (915885) on Tuesday February 07 2006, @04:39PM (#14663643) Homepage
    The big question is, what does Motorola gain by obstructing willing developers from bringing software to their platform?

    Control.
  • The RAZR and its ilk are standing on the shoulders of marginal work (like the v600)...Motorola tends to make the first few iterations, then bugfix, then make a good stable product. It's entirely possible that the Linux models aren't ready for primetime yet. (This is based on my experience with four v600's, a MPx220, and a RAZR.)
      • Better than the v600 by a good margin. Bout the same as a Nokia 6820 I had at the time. It's a quadband phone, so it'll get whatever GPRS reception is available. It's short of memory, but the V3(i?) has a slot for miniSD. It's got a flat crummy addressbook.

  • Who ever though it would be native apps? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Timesprout (579035) on Tuesday February 07 2006, @04:43PM (#14663689)
    I though it was blindingly obvious at the announcement that Mototola only saw Linux as a free os to run a Java VM on, if they had a hardware chip they could run the VM on Linux would be in the bin for the next product release.
    • Huh? ARM Jazelle chips can run Java natively, though the VM is still present to provide GC and such. But it doesn't matter if your chip can run Java just fine, you still need an OS and it might as well be Linux. IIRC their actual OS is called JUIX and is mostly written in pure Java, with Linux providing task switching and core memory management etc.
  • ...the cell phone of the future! The anti-DRM gpl'd software runs all music through a filter, transforming great hits like Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" to a scratchy likeness of "Another One bites the Dust" by Queen...

  • The reason... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by maxx_730 (909644) on Tuesday February 07 2006, @05:05PM (#14663899)
    Well as i said on Osnews already, i'm one of the moderators/editor from motorolafans.com, and have been since the beginning, and it's true that motorola hasn't been exactly helpfull with getting the sourcecode and they still owe us the bootloader code, too. The reason that they are so unhelpful is ofcourse really obvious. Who are their customers? The big telco companies. Where do big telco companies make their money from? From their customers calling with their phones. If you start giving out the kernel source and encourage hacking on these phones (with sdio hardware and a mini usb host controller), the users will be voiping in no time, which would piss of their customers, the telco's.
  • I have taken a look on their website, and there is nothing about a Linux phone.
    The phone specs are not at all detailed, they focus too much on design.
    Who would want a phone that looks like a rock?
    And the whole HelloMoto thing is just weird. Maybe it works for Japan, but not for the rest of the world.

    Above stuff has at least kept me away from motorola.
    Sony Ericsson does a lot better on the presentation area.
    Motorola should promote the tech side of the phone more.
    If I'd known about a Linux phone with decent f
    • Motorola lists as Linux phones the E895 (clamshell to be released 4th quarter 2005 - where is it?), the A910 (the E895 with WiFi radio for UMA access to cellular network - to be released 1st quarter 2006) and no less than the ROKR E2 (also to be released 1st quarter 2006). You may have to hunt for the news releases.

  • This is simple (Score:5, Insightful)

    by finkployd (12902) on Tuesday February 07 2006, @05:10PM (#14663948) Homepage
    Verizon, Cingular, etc. : "Hello Moto, we make a significant amount of money charging total idiots for the right to license crappy ring tones, useless apps, games, and backgrounds. If you release a phone to our customers that allows them to install their own apps, music, and images we will stop buying your phones. Speaking of which, make sure we can lock out DUN and OBEX on your new line of bluetooth phones."

    Motorola: "Yes sir, sorry sir."

  • Motorola drives me nuts (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07 2006, @05:12PM (#14663962)
    I was interested in writing a lightweight kernel to play with on the Motorola e815 and similar phones. Compiling binaries for the phone's cpu is no big deal, but the phone requires its kernel to be digitally signed.

    If you replace the built in kernel with an unsigned one, it won't run. I swore my ass off when I learned that, although I wasn't surprised.

    For anyone who claims there might be some FCC regulations that prevent this sort of experimentation, you won't produce interference accidentally with these phones. The radio interface is not complicated.

    (And don't get me started with Verizon crippling the Motorola phones they sell. It's best to buy the phones independently from the service.)

    I think the network service providers (Verizon et al.) should be banned from subsidizing phones, and be should be forced to allow the use of any phone compliant with the their networks' standards. There was an explosion in diversity of landline phones, and massive improvements in their capabilities and prices, when AT&T was similarly forced to untie the endpoint hardware from their network service. I want to see the same explosion occur in the wireless market.

    Their goal is to lock you in to old rates for a year or two at a time, and thereby avoid the amazing price competition which occurred in wired network phone service. If buying the handsets is decoupled from subscribing to the network, they'll have no reasonable rational for forcing people to sign long-term contracts, and we'll see proper competition again. I'd be happy as hell to see that. I want phones that serve me, rather than the network service provider.

  • Do any service providers sell these? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by un1xl0ser (575642) on Tuesday February 07 2006, @05:22PM (#14664060)
    I'm in the US, but I haven't seen Verizon/Cingular/Nextel/Sprint or any company offer a Linux based phone. It is one thing to be able to pay a company a few hundered dollars and have them give you the phone. Buying it on eBay or from a third party and hoping that it works with your service is different.

    As soon as I see Cingular with a Linux based phone, I will own^H^H^Hp4wNzz0r it.
  • Both the A780 and the E680 are available for US networks, though most of their other models don't work inside the US's GSM frequencies and there's a real lack of linux CDMA phones. Both of these models are being hacked and there's a small community of users using these as routers. see http://www.dewmill.com/linuxphone.html [dewmill.com] for an example.

    The dirth of linux smart phones has more to do with the weirdness of the US phone market. There are lots of cool linux phones (not just Motorola) that work outside the U

  • Two words: Customer Support (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Xonstein (927931) on Tuesday February 07 2006, @05:35PM (#14664169)
    They dont want native applications because they are more likely to brick the phone, causing warranty and customer support nightmare for carriers.

  • Motorola phones suck ? (Score:3, Informative)

    by dindi (78034) on Tuesday February 07 2006, @05:53PM (#14664340) Homepage
    For me it is an easy answer: I try to be polite: I dislike Motorola phones, and I am not surprised if tech savvy people would not get them, and would not care if it is linux, symbian or ce.

    I personally really do not care if my phone runs linux, and even if it did I would not waste the time to write some killer custom app just because I can ... Of course I am not saying that I would not write scripts or whatever needed to maintain my data.

    Besides: a phone's life span is soo short (unlike those old times) that for the time you develop something (as a hobbiist) someone comes out with a phone with 3 times bigger display, zoom lens camera and whatever else unneeded crap and you can start patching ....

    I mean do you need linux on your phone ? Do you have a Motorola phone? Even that there are development tools for your phone, did you write a CE/Linux/Java/Midp/whatever app for it?

    OK, I am negative today

  • I call bullshit here. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ashridah (72567) on Tuesday February 07 2006, @06:14PM (#14664540)
    I definently have to call bullshit, at least based on what's in the summary in this article.

    The Motorola SDK for their mobile phones is available right now, both the linux and non-linux varieties of phones.

    This article is discussing, of course, the availability of the linux source code itself, not the SDK. You do not need the linux source code in order to develop applications for their linux-based mobile phones, and to be perfectly honest, having to jump through hoops to get the kernel source really isn't that big a deal, since getting the SDK is as simple as signing up at www.motocoders.com

    ash

    • Re:I call bullshit here. (Score:5, Informative)

      by rar (110454) on Tuesday February 07 2006, @09:12PM (#14665972) Homepage
      The Motorola SDK for their mobile phones is available right now, both the linux and non-linux varieties of phones.

      Having experience with one of the Motorola phones myself, I belive the article describes the current situation very accurately. As the article explains: the public SDK is only for java development. The intresting thing with having a Linux phone is to develop native applications. There is no public SDK from Motorola for native applications. That is the problem.
  • Do any of these Linux phones work with the services in the US? I haven't seen any being offered by the carriers themselves.
  • Having worked on a product for Symbian developers, I can assure you that the Symbian SDKs are not "given away". Symbian charged us to be "partners" with them. Then they charged for access to the SDK. Then they charged for access to the source. Then they charged for access to support. On and on. And the contracts were so constrictive that our legal department threw up their hands in despair. I believe they have every right to charge for their proprietary IP, but I want to make sure that the impression that t

  • There is a lot of room for improvement in SDKs (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As someone who has done the embedded linux thing I've seen a couple of trends. First, you get a bunch of hard embedded guys who are used to controlling the hardware with an RTOS and they try to cram an app into a driver. It can work, it can even be "easy" but it's not really the linux way, it's not clean, you don't get a lot of advantages of having Linux in the first place.

    The other one is shitty dev tools compared to some of the stuff you can do with other platforms. I'm a big fan of GCC and the l

  • A little bit of info (Score:5, Informative)

    by jonwil (467024) on Tuesday February 07 2006, @09:45PM (#14666200)
    Most normal Motorola phones (like the E378i I have) use something called a Neptune as the main processor (its an ARM with a DSP inside I believe) with a custom motorola operating system (known as p2k in the moto modding community because of the p2k.sys driver used to access it).
    The Motorola Linux phones use a platform called EZX. This consists of a Neptune processor like in a normal p2k phone with a (presumably different) version of the p2k operating system running on it to handle the network side (i.e. actually talking to the cell tower) and then an Intel ARM chip running a modified version of MontaVista Linux for the rest of the phone software.
    They are using a modified version of the BLOB bootloader and a 2.4.x Kernel.
    The userland is made up of various normal utillities (e.g. glibc, gnu fileutils etc) plus a (aparently hevily modified) version of qtEmbedded and a pile of motorola specific stuff.

    Motorola HAVE released a kernel source tree for the EZX phones. And people have reported getting it to compile and run on their phones. Whether its complete, up-to-date or accurate I dont know.

    Motorola are under no obligation to provide any SDK for these phones.
    The only thing they need to do is to release the source code for any components under licences that require them to do so (e.g. BLOB, kernel, glibc etc). So far, other than the kernel release, they have not done so.
    Several requests have been sent to motorola requesting the source code to those comonents but so far, no code has been forthcomming.

    Motorola are under no obligations to share the source code, SDKs, docs, headers etc to the motorola specific stuff on the phone (unless its some how derived from GPL code that is). They are also not under any obligation to share any code to things like qtEmbedded (they probobly have a commercial licence from trolltech for that).

    There are reports of a "leaked" SDK for EZX phones but I dont know much about it (using it would probobly be a violation of copyright anyway so its probobly best not to)

    The most promising work is going on at www.openezx.org. People there are trying to make replacements for the motorola propriatory kernel modules and software bits as well as trying to reverse engineer the propriatory libraries motorola have used as well as trying to get motorola to release the code required under GPL (having the motorola version of BLOB in particular would be nice since it could lead to a better way to modify things on the phone without some of the hacks that are required now)

    Thanks to the OpenEZX project for most of the information contained here.
    • Okay, whatever. Mod me down. Motorola is a pain to deal with, and I'm venting. Fine. You may think I'm being overly critical, but all the way around, the results of people's experiences in dealing with them paints a pretty clear picture of a company floundering. They've been deliberately obtuse about product defects, don't communicate critical information to their developers (APIs, anyone?), and generally make things difficult for their customers. My point was that they've brought this on themselves,
    • Well grain of salt I work for Cingular. And own both phones in question.

      V551 is a batter hog, I never used it to play mp3s other than the ringtones, and they tended to play fine. Mine kept crapping out on the charger port so finally the warranty department sent me a V3.

      Great batter life, I charge it about every 5 days, sometimes six. Works well with all of my blue tooth headsets.

      I did not want to like the V3 but mine has been a solid performer. The UI could use work, but the majority of the customers w

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.