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Communications Software Handhelds Linux Hardware

Two New Linux Phones to Ship in Japan 83

Posted by CowboyNeal from the let-the-penguin-do-the-talking dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Japan's largest mobile carrier has announced two new Linux phones with support for push-to-talk, multiple numbers, and other advanced features. Of the six models models in NTT DoCoMo's new 902i-series, the two running embedded Linux are made by NEC and Panasonic, who have been collaborating on a Linux-based software platform for 3G mobile phones. The NEC-manufactured N902i boasts a four megapixel camera, while the Panasonic-made P902i aims to appeal to music lovers, with music jukebox software and an available 1GB MiniSD card. Between these and Motorola's Linux mobile phones, Linux seems to be doing well in Asia, in the rapidly growing feature-phone space, which is projected to comprise the majority of global mobile phone shipments by 2010."
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Two New Linux Phones to Ship in Japan More

Two New Linux Phones to Ship in Japan

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  • Push-to-Talk? What countries have telecoms that offer that? The US is far behind in cellular technology, but this feature has existed on at least 2 US carriers (Nextel/Sprint and Verizon wireless) for some time now.

    • Re:Push to talk? (Score:4, Informative)

      by rathehun ( 818491 ) on Friday October 28, 2005 @05:09AM (#13895407) Homepage
      Well, India for one. The large phone companies - Hutchisson, Orange and Airtel all provide Push-to-talk.

    • Well, we've had it here in India since mid-2004 atleast -- it's not very popular though. In fact most people probably haven't even heard of it. But then cell-to-cell rates in India are as low as 50 paise per minute (that's about 1 cent per minute).

      Also, service providers offer a 'Friends & Family' type plan where you can make absolutely free calls within a group of users (and those are proper duplex calls, unlike PoC ones)

      -YoGiX

    • Re:Push to talk? (Score:3, Informative)

      by m_member ( 771187 )
      They are closed, proprietary protocols. The future of PTT is PoC/PAG as defined by the OMA.

      PoC - Push to Talk Over Cellular
      PAG - Presence & Group Management
      OMA - Open Mobile Alliance

      TLA overload :-S
    • this feature has existed on at least 2 US carriers (Nextel/Sprint and Verizon wireless) for some time now.

      And before that we had Pull-to-Talk..

      http://www.photospin.com/search/?page=single&id=79 60 [photospin.com]

    • Re:Push to talk? (Score:2, Informative)

      by bazorg ( 911295 )
      All 3 mobile telecoms here in Portugal do. Every now and then they make TV ads with real life situations where they imagine people would use it.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Push to talk? (Score:2, Informative)

        by torpor ( 458 )

        its useful for when you don't need to have a full-blown fire-up/tear-down conversation, and only need to use the cell phone to provide info/updates.

        its good for taxi companies, for example; they just outfit their cabbies with cell phones with this feature, and one of their traditionally biggest expenses [airtime] is now cheap as pie.

        i for one welcome these new 'communication modes' that our machines are forcing upon us. maybe we'll all get along.
        • its useful for when...

          Unfortunately, the majority of people I've seen using push-to-talk are fairly abusive with it. There's really no reason people need to be having full-on conversations in walkie-talkie mode on public transportaion, which is quite common, unfortunately.

      • Re:Push to talk? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by ajs318 ( 655362 )
        As I remember, push-to-talk was how early two-way radios worked. The same circuit would act as a receiver or -- at the push of a button -- a transmitter. The same frequency was used for speech in both directions. The advent of cheap transistors with a few MHz of bandwidth led to cheap two-way radios being marketed as kids' toys. They were probably illegal as hell; but then, the batteries would barely last long enough for The Authorities to find anyone using them.

        The very early VHF mobile phones {wher
  • > rapidly growing feature-phone space, which is projected to
    > comprise the majority of global mobile phone shipments by 2010.

    I think I heard that before... something about trying to sell us something... Hmmmm, "3G" rings a bell for some reason...

    As an aside, the fact that there're wizzier mobile phones capable of doing weird stuff is great because there're obviously people who like them. The leap to being the "majority of the market," however, seems to me like a bit of a leap of faith. Or maybe d
  • > Linux seems to be doing well in Asia

    Seriously, some distinction has to be made between Asia and South Asia (Orient and Asia, for centuries).

    • Re:Asia (Score:2)

      by KH ( 28388 )
      I agree that there should be some distinctions between various parts of Asia. But dividing it into two would be just silly. What about Central Asia (various -sthans in ex-USSR and parts of China), Southeast Asia (Indochina peninsula, Indonesia, Philippins, etc.)? And Middle-East used to be part of Asia as well (Near East). And North Asia (Siberia, and possibly Mongol?).

      From the European (Greco-Roman) perspective, anything beyond the Bosporus strait was Orient/Asia.

      From the modern "North American" (not t
      • >I agree that there should be some distinctions between various parts of Asia. But >dividing it into two would be just silly.

        Well, I did not want to go that far into time! I just wanted differentiation between the 'Asia' we talk about: We already have Central Asia (Mongolia would be here!), Orient (Br.) (or Asia (Am.)) - we would have Indo-China, Japan, China, et al, and Middle-east for any country from Afghanistan to Israel/Palestein-Turkey.

  • How much will it $ave me?

    • Re:All I care about is... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      How much will it $ave me?

      I'm guessing nothing. The appeal for manufacturers is how much it will save them.
  • haha, cingular supports push to talk, the new LG and samsung push to talk phones will be out soon, ive used them a few times, not bad at all! the LG phone i used for the PTT is setup kind of like a buddy list, you can pull up the list, and see everyone who is "avail" which is a nice feature

  • Push-to-talk (Score:4, Informative)

    by myspys ( 204685 ) on Friday October 28, 2005 @05:48AM (#13895463) Homepage
    I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering what this is, so help yourselves:

    Push to walk at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].

    • BAH! They can keep the stupid Push to Talk. The only thing worse than someone yelling on their cellphone in the supermarket ( sidetone [answers.com], anyone?) is someone yelling while using PTT in the supermarket. I really *don't* want to hear you on the phone and I certainly don't need to hear the person on the other end of the line.

      I think PTT has its places, though. I think it could be very valuable in the construction business where you could put all kinds of contractors and consultants in the same list. I'm sur

      • You forgot to mention the annoying 'chirp' every damned time they press the button, between the periods of shouting into their cell phone.

        We had Nextel at my last job -- other people seemed to love it ... I thought it was just plain obnoxious

    • Re:Push-to-talk (Score:5, Informative)

      by Myself ( 57572 ) on Friday October 28, 2005 @09:13AM (#13896290) Journal
      It's a giant leap backward in communications. Half-duplex means there's no way to interrupt a rag-chewer. You know the old comedian's line "stop me if you've heard this one"? Sabotaged by PTT!

      I hate not being able to hear the listener's reactions as I'm talking. No sigh, no laugh, no "what?", leaves me without crucial tidbits of information that are so essential to human communication.

      Furthermore, PTT doesn't include a way to leave a message if the victim doesn't answer. Most implementations even use a separate numbering space, so knowing someone's phone number doesn't tell you their PTT number, and vice versa.

      What's ironic is that the original motivation behind PTT (the benefits of statistical multiplexing) doesn't even hold true anymore, because cellphone codecs are so good at compressing the quiet side of a conversation, you get almost the same efficiency with a full-duplex call as you do with the horrible PTT.

      The typical implementation of PTT as speakerphone is just poor etiquette on the seller's part. It works the same with the regular earpiece instead of the loudspeaker, but holding the phone is infinitely more awkward because you have to press the damn button.

  • Stronger? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dawhippersnapper ( 861941 ) on Friday October 28, 2005 @05:51AM (#13895471) Homepage
    I'm really happy that the technology is progressing, but I wished they'd progress some in making these expensive phones out of expensive less breakable materials. Maybe some of that aluminum glass over the LCD? In the past couple of years I've bought two expensive phones that both had LCD damage that warranty didn't cover once shipped back.

  • Market Share (Score:3, Informative)

    by putko ( 753330 ) on Friday October 28, 2005 @06:00AM (#13895485) Homepage Journal
    Symbian is the dominant OS. Linux is second.
    Something Called "Windows" is in there too.
    Here is the article [linuxdevices.com]

    I'm confused though -- are the Symbian phones not feature rich compared to Linux? I figured that was the whole point; it has better phone features (power management?). I'm guessing that the article is trumpeting Linux's success when it isn't exactly warranted (but at least it is kicking Windows ass).

    • Re:Market Share (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Eric Giguere ( 42863 ) on Friday October 28, 2005 @06:15AM (#13895518) Homepage Journal
      Symbian is not the easiest OS to write for. Also, Symbian is dominated by Nokia [symbian.com], who bought out Motorola's share a couple of years back (which allowed Motorola to work on developing Microsoft Smartphone [microsoft.com] devices). See the Wikipedia entry for Symbian OS [wikipedia.org] for more. Over time, I'm sure the power management features of Linux phones will be just as sophisticated.

      Eric
      BlackBerry programming information [ericgiguere.com] (speaking of non-Symbian)

    • Re:Market Share (Score:4, Informative)

      by LaughingCoder ( 914424 ) on Friday October 28, 2005 @06:41AM (#13895599)
      Having done cellphone development for quite a few years, I can attest to the difficulty in developing for Symbian. The tools are buggy, and no 2 Symbian phones are the same - we had a different executable for each and every model. The Microsoft phones were much better to develop for. The tools were free and quite good. And we ran the same executable on every Microsoft-based phone, including both Smartphones (non-stylus button phones) and Pocket PC derivatives (stylus/touch screen). Further, we had the luxury of building and testing the exact same source tree on the desktop, which really accelerated development.

      All of that said, I think Linux could pretty quickly dominate the mobile space. I have done some embedded Linux development and it has many of the attributes of the Microsoft environment (good tools, lots of "sample" code, ability to do parallel desktop builds). And since Linux has a much smaller footprint the phones can be cheaper, which will help with adoption. Now hopefully the phone vendors will standardize on a common API so the poor application developers don't have to create a separate install package for every model. Unfortunately, past history is not very encouraging in this regard.

    • Re:Market Share (Score:2, Interesting)

      by yourexhalekiss ( 833943 )
      What does a "linux-powered" mobile phone mean, actually? How different is embedded linux from what I'm running on my computer right now? Basically, what I'm tryin to ask is,

      Could I hook one of these up to my SuSE box with way less problems than I would have with a phone with another OS?
    • Your linuxdevices article is misleading, as it only includes windows mobile smartphones, not the more powerful windows mobile pocketpc phones, such as the HTC Jam / XDA mini, which I am seeing all over the place these days. If you add those devices WM at least matches the numbers of the linux phones, and the phones are less locked down, making them a better choice for people who actually want to do more than make phone calls with their WAN-enabled mobile device. Its actually funny that these devices are b
      • The problem is these devices tend to make pretty poor phones. Really read the reviews on phonescoop sometimes. They are good to okay PDAs but crummy phones.
        I think the ideal solution will be PDA/Notebook + bluetooth cellphone. The problem is that the cell phones have not gotten their act together on cheap data plans yet. Sometimes convergence is not a good thing. Just think about it a PDA/Cellphone/Ipod will cost more than just a cell phone and their are times when you may not want to have all three functio
        • I worked in the last generation of this phone (the n900i... the one with dragon quest) and, as a phone, it worked perfectly. The rest of features where a nice bonus too. Not enough to spend my money buying it, but, hey, I am just a poor gaijin anyway.

          The only thing I never really tough well of was the penchant for 3D java avatars to use while TV-phoning. What's the point of using an avatar in video-conference, anyway?

          That and the lousy boot time... but it's not like the phone has to be off all the time.

  • What's the advantage? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dr.Sweety ( 917213 ) on Friday October 28, 2005 @06:23AM (#13895543)
    Disclaimer: this is NOT a flamebait, I'm a Linux user and Opensource fan!
    I was wondering why they actually use Linux on a mobilephone. Linux is open - which is great - but isn't the GNU license pretty unattractive for something as closed as a mobile phone? I mean the mobile phone companies and providers probably have no interest in opening the source and thus making it available to the competition and allowing people to easily hack the phone.
    I would be really interested why a mobile phone company should choose Linux over something like Symbian (or even Windows Mobile :) which of course costs license fee but on the other hand is a very customised plattform for mobile phone devices.
    • the manufactures dont really have anything to lose with the underlying os, very few people care and its not like their competitors can just take their work since the competitors phones will probably use different chips etc.

      the apps they install on top of the os may be locked down but they dont need to be opensource.
    • thus making it available to the competition and allowing people to easily hack the phone.

      I don't think manufacturers would mind that at all. Would you mind if a competing manufacturer bought your phone at retail only to change the OS and sell it at what they paid you+some profit?

      You don't think that phone manufacturers don't know how their competition's phones work, do you? They all use commodity parts. The chips that they're using are well documented, and for DSPs, an assembly call can be almost as invo

      • What you really want to have an edge over the competition is the ability to swap out parts of your code base really fast to fit with whatever the latest chip to come along is so that you can beat your competitors to the market with the new models. With linux's support of many devices it is an ideal choice for this.

        I totally agree on that, but does linux support such specialized chips as used in mobile phones? I could imagine, that you would have to write your own driver for it anyway and I was just wonder

        • does linux support such specialized chips as used in mobile phones

          Yes and no. In general, GCC supports nearly every chipset used by mobile phones. Also in general, linux supports nearly everything that GCC does. Getting Linux to work on whatever you've got, therefore, only requires tweaking the kernel.

          A lot of the I/O type chips used in mobile phones are used elsewhere in drivers that you get from Linux. So you may not have to do anything as far as module development goes.

          The big thing that you'd have t
    • isn't the GNU license pretty unattractive for something as closed as a mobile phone?

      Besides the other reasons already mentioned, the GPL license only applies to the GPL parts, that is, the kernel including drivers (some drivers might be in the binary-module grey area); utilities; and popular GPL applications. The manufacturer can run as many closed binary programs on the phone as they wish. This is where most of the value add for the phone is, kernel mods are not.

      In fact, manufacturers tend to be eager to
  • Is that a penguin in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
  • when vendors don't have an agreement with microsoft that punishes them if they ship a competing product.

    Hello - DOJ are you watching?

  • Possible because geeks can't assemble them (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Friday October 28, 2005 @06:53AM (#13895620)
    NEC and Panasonic can think of shipping these phones because geeks cannot easily assemble these phones from legacy parts. If this ever becomes possible, NEC and Panasonic will jump ship on the effort, just like other OEMs in the computer world. That's one of the reasons why it's very hard to find a Linux-ready and loaded notebook.
  • What's interesting about the Japanese manufacturers use of Linux is that it uses Linux to completely eliminate the users freedom to run whatever software they want, and use their phones in the way they want. Japanese phones are locked up tighter than something very tight indeed, with no installing or using anything you didn't pay for. It's ironic given Linux uses the Free Software GPL even if the project itself is more "Open Source" than "Free Software".
  • but does it run lin... oh, nevermind.
  • I'm a fan of Linux as well. But I gotta say, M$ has done a great job on smartphone, and has made it incredibly easy to program for it. Not to mention the interop with the most popular OS in the world...
  • Why does Asia get all of this Linux mobile technology first? It seems as if most Linux embedded technology either fails to hit the Western world or else it gets withdrawn. Case in point the Sharp Zaurus line of handhelds. cooler than anything, but the only way you can get one in the U.S. is to import one from a company that reprograms them for Western keyboard functions and whatnot.
  • Why do people like "push to talk"? If all we had were still walkie talkies like that, the intro of regular mobile phones would make everyone heave a sigh of relief. No more people shouting at their phones and beeping sharply every 3 seconds as they walk around. No more missing people's first/last words as we work an unnecessary button. I understand the appeal of "free". but we've also got free in-network calling with normal phones that don't require we talk like 7 year olds rudely playing "cockpit" in front
  • I('m watching the phones from Japan's Access [access-us-inc.com]. They bought the PalmOS division from Palm right before Palm went Microsoft this year. That was right after PalmOS acquired China Mobilesoft and announced the next PalmOS would be Linux, with old PalmOS compatibility for the GUI and all the legacy apps. Any clues to which HW that little dream OS will run on?
  • Does anybody know whether the NEC/Panasonic platform uses Qt/Embedded? Thanks.
  • The only advantage of a phone being Linux is if you can actually get access to the Linux-y bits of it. I have a Linux handset in my drawer at work, and the fact it's Linux is completely irrelevant as I can't get a bash prompt. However, I have seen a Siemens phone running on Linux, and you can actually telnet or minicom to it. It's pretty cool to be able to run bash, ps, ping etc on a phone. It doesn't have a compiler on it though, so I won't be trying to put Gentoo on it.
  • Really.... do the phone customers in Asia whom are buying these phones know or care that it is running Linux? Ask Joe user what OS is his phone running... chances are you will get a reply like "OS?". Only us nerds care about the phone OS. Normal people just care that their phone runs stable and do the features that they bought it to do regardless of OS.

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