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Communications Software Linux

Consortium Tackles Linux Mobile Phone Standards 75

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the don't-leave-home-without-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com is running an article stating that ten companies have recently banded together to launch a cross-industry consortium to further advance embedded Linux platforms. They hope to make 'Linux into a plug-and-play mobile phone platform comparable to Microsoft's Windows Mobile Smartphone OS, but with greater flexibility and lower costs. The LiPS (Linux Phone Standard) Forum intends to help make Linux a more standardized, interoperable mobile phone OS.' Meanwhile, some market research suggests that Linux is already giving Windows Mobile a run for its money."
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Consortium Tackles Linux Mobile Phone Standards More

Consortium Tackles Linux Mobile Phone Standards

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  • Tux Racer (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I had better be able to play Tux Racer on these phones... otherwise, what good are they?

  • Well, duh. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Slartibartfast ( 3395 ) * <ken@jot[ ]rg ['s.o' in gap]> on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:08AM (#14025209) Homepage Journal
    C'mon. If you're an embedded developer, what're you going to (want to) go for? A closed-source, royalty-based model, or an open-source, royalty-free model -- especially wherein you're able to modify the kernel to your whim? MS's marketing will be sure to push the first option, but common sense really makes the second pretty damn attractive.

    • Re:Well, duh. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by NevDull ( 170554 )
      The LiPS (Linux Phone Standard) Forum intends to help make Linux a more standardized, interoperable mobile phone OS.

      Modifying the kernel to your whim isn't the intent of this consortium. Standardization is. You appear to have missed the point of LiPS.

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

      by ozmanjusri ( 601766 )
      MS's marketing will be sure to push the first option, but common sense really makes the second pretty damn attractive.

      You'd think so, but over here in Australia, I can't buy a Linux smartphone. I've looked around, phoned around and done everything short of getting on my knees and begging, but no-one will sell them.

      I've ended up getting a Pocket PC phone - the iMate Jam. http://www.clubimate.com/t-DETAILS_JAM.aspx [clubimate.com] It's good as a phone, and compact enough not to get in the way. I'm a long-time Palm user

    • Re:Well, duh. (Score:4, Informative)

      by LaughingCoder ( 914424 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:42AM (#14025358)
      It's not quite as "duh" as you might think. I did mobile application development for 3 years on Windows (and I also did some embedded Linux and a tiny bit of Symbian and BREW) and I can attest that the Windows platform is far and away the most advanced from an application developer's perspective. The tools are excellent (and free, I might add) and the added benefit of being able to do most of my development on a Windows desktop target (yes, the same source built and ran for a Windows XP desktop, a Pocket PC, and a Smartphone) was a tremedous productivity boost. That said, when I did my embedded Linux work I was also able to do functional development on a desktop, so I think Linux will give Windows a run for its money in this space. And of course, access to the source code is gravy. You just can't appreciate how painful device-based development can be relative to desktop development until you experience it firsthand. Symbian (and Microsoft) both offer emulators which are helpful, but in my experience they fall far short of the advantages that derive from actually developing the code in a desktop environment.

      • hear hear (Score:3, Interesting)

        by samjam ( 256347 )
        I second this; I did Smartphone 2002/2003 work for Orange for a couple of years.

        I was very busy, and every now and then I had a go on symbian only to get "wth? Now what?"; the whole symbian thing was an incomplete model of a cut-down psion3 system, which made sense in the psion3 but not a symbian phone. Anyway, I never got very far in the little time I didn't have. Never mind "dip a toe in" with symbian you had to nearly drown before you could get anywhere.

        Smartphone on the other hand was a doddle, there w
      • You just can't appreciate how painful device-based development can be relative to desktop development until you experience it firsthand.

        You ain't kidding. Being able to read the source of the firmware I have issues with, or the SDK components that blow up in specified and version-dependent ways on a daily basis, would cut my development time by 90%.

        Here, you are talking about happier developers - happier developers with faster development times make successful companies.

  • I'll save you all the hassle... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zouden ( 232738 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:16AM (#14025236)
    "why oh why can't I just get a phone that works as a phone?!"
    There, hopefully that'll stop this discussion from having 80% comments like this...
    • the future is a cell phone with every conceivable handheld tool/app ever, we've already got:
      1. cameras
      2. mp3 players
      3. alarm clocks
      4. organizers
      5. calculators
      6. video games
      7. GPS receivers
      8. Memo recorders
      9. video cameras

      I'm still waiting for the following devices in cell phones:

      1. swiss army knives
      2. pencil sharpeners
      3. staplers
      4. handguns
      5. shavers
      6. electric toothbrushes

      Anything I forgot?

      • I'm still waiting for the following devices in cell phones: 1. swiss army knives 2. pencil sharpeners 3. staplers 4. handguns
        Smartphone with handgun and camera is really cool idea. Think about long-distance kills. But beware of spyware on your phone ! If some third party trigger handgun while you are speaking... (You can rely on the manufacturers design team that gun barrel will point to your temple while you are speaking)
      • 7. Rectal Thermometor
        8. Bong err... Novelty Tobacco Pipe
        9. Breathalyzer (but probably not if it does 7...)
        10. Jerky Machine and/or Smoker


        I'm sure no. 3 would generate alot of complaints. Though the risk of stapling your face if you get bumped into would make for some short calls.
        Ooh! If they could make a phone into a personal assistant (kind of like a meatspace clilppy) that would be neat for a day or two.

  • linux (Score:5, Insightful)

    by akhomerun ( 893103 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:18AM (#14025243)
    i didn't realize how huge linux was in the smartphone market. i figured it was all between windows mobile and symbian.

    i can see standardizing mobile linux as being a very good thing for linux in that market.

    maybe linux's lead isn't so large - the last link in the article, when you read through it, points out that the data does not inlclude phones/pdas running on microsoft's pocket PC edition of windows.
  • Symbian should be the real target here. Mobile Windows is very resource hungry. An embedded Linux for mobile devices that is stingy with resources to conserve battery life would be a welcome addition.

  • Am I still in time? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You guys must all be new here, else I would have seen:

    Yes, But do they run Linux......

  • Hurray! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LaughingCoder ( 914424 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:35AM (#14025320)
    This will be a boon to mobile application developers! Symbian is basically controlled by one vendor - Nokia, and Windows Mobile obviously is controlled by Microsoft. Both OSes have their advantages and their problems. Symbian typically requires a unique executable to be built for every device. Windows needs a *slightly* beefier hardware platform (8MB minimum). Tools-wise Windows is in much better shape than Symbian. Embedded Linux could give both a run for their money. It will offer better tools (by far) than Symbian - almost on a par with Windows tools most likely -- and it will offer lighter resource requirements than Windows. The smart phone vendors should be all over this. It will be really interesting to see how Nokia reacts given their tremendous investment in, and control of, Symbian.

    • Re:Hurray! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It will be really interesting to see how Nokia reacts given their tremendous investment in, and control of, Symbian.

      http://www.maemo.org/ [maemo.org]?

    • Re:Hurray! (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Nokia has released several Linux-based phones already. It's aiming for using Linux in the low-end phone market, and Symbian for the high-end phones. Don't forget that network operators also have a huge influence in mobile phone specifications. They would be reluctant to have to support too many platforms and your average user wouldn't care less what OS their phone runs, as long as it doesn't eat battery life, boots quickly and is responsive.
  • Yes, all you need to od to get your new LiPs phone up and running is manually edit your hosts.conf with your 52 digit personal PIN and then PGP encode it and symlink it to blah blah blah.....

    Just kidding! Actually this had me worrying for a bit until the magic words
    "open standards created by industry groups"
    appeared. It would be all to easy to take existing linux code and kludge it together with a pile of proprietary, closed/patented kernel hacks or libraries so that you end up with something nearly

  • Not likely to succeed from a feature perspective (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ostiguy ( 63618 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:44AM (#14025359)
    ... in the US, at least. Look at how Verizon Wireless cripples phones' feature sets. Was the ROKR's 100 song limitation resulting from Apple's desire to not have it compete with its Ipods, or was it the desire of the wireless carriers to not impact their ringtone business, or a little of both? I would not be surprised to see embedded linux being used to drive down device costs, but as a platform to provide new wireless features, it seems that time and time again, the U.S wireless carriers expect to extract fees.

    The standardization on GSM in Europe and other places would seem to invite the possibility of a market where you bring your own phone (versus having it generally tied to a provider via a protocol), and this could foster new apps running on linux phones, but GPRS does not provide a lot of bandwidth to do interesting things.

    I guess syncing PIM and email stuff is all well and good, but for new and inventive applications, I would not be too optimistic

    ostiguy
    • My opinion is that if the market cannot embrace new technologies, then the market must undergo a paradigm shift. If current providers of mobile service cannot embrace advancements, new providers must be started. If manufacturers will not develop newer, more powerful devices, new manufacturers must start producing. Hell, if someone can get a decent hardware patent for a next-generation embedded Linux platform that sells well because it implements the newest hardware, you can bet Microsoft and Verizon will c
    • I was thinking that this wouldn't succeed until Verizon, et al., can use the standard platform to turn off anything at re-route it though their wireless pay-to-play system.

      Your ROKR comment is the key reason why full-price phones and a la carte service would be a boon to consumers. Sadly, we live in a WalMart US market, where saving a few dollars now (free $100 phone) and paying extra each month in add-on fees is worth more than spending the money to get an unencumbered product. In some ways it makes sens
    • I always find it amusing when US companies are going to set standards, or develop working groups for mobile phone technologies. Why? Because it seems that the US has one of the most crippled mobile telecommunications system in the western world.

      Countries in Europe can have roaming mobile phones between borders that were still fighting a war to the death just over 50 years ago, while the US can't even do it properly between towns (let alone states).

      Nothing really insightful here, but always something that
      • "Countries in Europe can have roaming mobile phones between borders taht were still fighting a war to the death just over 50 years ago, while the US can't even do it properly between towns (let alone states)."

        I dunno where you get your facts. I don't know anybody that has a cell phone, and can't use it anywhere in the US. Sure...there are some dead spots here and there...not a lot of towers in rural places, etc. But, I can take any phone I've had to any state in the US and use it just fine.

        Ok, now many o

      • The US is different, not good or bad. While Verizon Wireless generally does try to corner the market on anti consumer behavior (crippling phones, etc), its broadband cellular data service EVDO is pretty amazing. Basically, if Verizon Wireless did not have such a broad coverage map, they probably could not do such things. Sprint is now trying to compete with 3G data rates as well. Using GPRS on my blackberry is painful, and cannot be used for anything serious. Is there any pan-European 3G GSM data service?
    • Look at how Verizon Wireless cripples phones' feature sets.
      I don't get it. Isn't that a reason for why it will succeed? People don't want crippled phones and they don't want to pay extra for trivial features. If there's a good open phone on the market, people will want it, and they'll politely decline whatever Verizon offers.

  • Um, so it's low memory/lowcpu usage... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Colin Smith ( 2679 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:45AM (#14025366)
    Can I get it for my laptop? Seriously...

    KDE/Gnome, Firefox, Thunderbird. Open Office. All huge.

     

  • I know that Symbian is a "bad" OS, after all its only a reliable ground up operating system that has had the misfortune to have been created in Europe and be closed source.

    But given that it has nearly 3/4 of the market and is clearly the dominant player, and its supported by companies that embrace open-source... shouldn't there be more OSS support for Symbian rather than an obsession with having Linux as the OS?

    Think of Symbian as the Mac OSX for mobiles, but with Windows Marketshare.
    • There are some OSS apps for Symbian - PuTTY, for example - but not many. I think the thing is that Symbian isn't that much fun to develop for, a lot of the development tools (emulator etc) are Windows-only and the Symbian market is quite good for selling software too, so a lot of the small utilities end up as pay-software rather than OSS.

      At some point, I might port SiEd [benroe.com] from PalmOS to Symbian, as I haven't used my Tungsten E in six months and I would like a decent editor on my phone.
      • Also the performance of symbianOS is very bad;
        everything just is sloppy, and benchmarks show that some things are MANY times faster on linux with similar hardware.

        reasons for the slowness:

        a) microkernel architecture, lots of inter-process communication
        b) difficult development, it's difficult enought to get the software running on symbian, making them run quickly would be even more difficult.
        it's easy to send 100 individual requests between processes when the requests should be grouped and sent at once or th
  • I have to wonder why a telephone needs an OS. In an environment where CPU power is an incredibly valuable resource, responsiveness is essentiual and there are none of the complications of device drivers and hard disks, surely the only program that is needed is a graphic front end for the hardware with a minimal filing system to look after ringtones and contact details? Why is an abstraction layer needed?
    • Because the drive in mobile phones is towards smartphones, which provide PDA functionality as well. To provide that easily, you need a decent OS, windowing system and widget set.
    • surely the only program that is needed is a graphic front end for the hardware with a minimal filing system to look after ringtones and contact details? Why is an abstraction layer needed?

      Because you may want to run a graphic animation while the phone is ringing, and without an OS you wouldn't be able to run two processes at the same time? Because having an OS doesn't means reponsiveness is poor? Because you need a filesystem? Because abstraction is not something bad? Because today's phones have plenty of r
      • Spawning processes just to do some simple animation is exactly the sort of wastefulness I'm complaining about, and leads to unresponsiveness. Arcade games managed this sort of thing with a 1Mhz 8-bit chip precicely because they didn't carry around a mess of abstraction. If phones kept things simple (and I can see no resaon for a file system any more complex than that of (say) an Apple II) then the power requirements would drastically reduce, and the battert life would rise drastically.

        • If the hardware is built well, and the OS is Linux, you should be able to tell it to turn everything off and go down to minimal power consumption, don't even bother ringing or displaying anything, you're psychic, you'll know when to answer and who it is! No need for the microphone or speaker either, your friends are just like you :-P

          I personally don't want a smartphone, I want something like the Nokia 770 except it should be a usb2, firewire and exapansion card host also. I want one which can hold many m

  • How about an open source calling plan?
  • if you look carefully at the picture of the ROAD "linux clamshell" linked from the article [linuxdevices.com], you will see the top left hand of the window saying something like "Win.... ROAD" - and the GUI is clearly a Windows (clone?).
    talk about reimplementing the dominant paradigm.....
  • The most important missing feature of the "global mobile phone network" is interoperability. There isn't even a standard format for ringtones or wallpaper, let alone downloadable applications. Open data formats are the key to opening phones as a single platform that any developer can reach with products and services. Otherwise it costs way too much to enter the market. That status quo serves the giant phone companies, both HW and network operators, who can afford to compete, and prefer to compete only with
  • When can I license the Access PalmOS/Linux [palmsource.com] that Palm has morphed into?
    • I saw an early prototype of it demoed back at Palmsource in May. The ship date was supposed to be Q2 next year, I thought.
      • Then now is a good time to start dealing with their licensing/marketing people. Far enough in advance to have time to work out details. Before "crunch time" in the weeks before their deadline. And within sight, so features should be fairly stable.

        Did you get the sense that it will be able to run practically all existing PalmOS (5) apps? And Linux ncurses apps (in the Debian src repository, say) just recompiled for their binary platform? How about the promise that Linux apps will run with PalmOS GUI layer ca

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