Airtime

The Penguin Goes Mobile

By Carlo Longino

The mobile world has been spill the beans about Linux - powered smartphones for quite some time . Although they have yet to catch on in great act outside Asia , Linux for mobile confine great potential difference as a low - price competitor to other peregrine operating systems like Symbian , Palm OS and Windows Mobile . But putting Linux on a nomadic telephone is n’t as simple as download a release and installing it on your desktop , and there are several obstruction to its wider acceptation — but those barriers are beginning to diminish .

The attraction of Linux for the mobile blank is , on one level , much the same as other smartphone OSes : it can provide a flexible , powerful environment in which advanced applications and inspection and repair can be extend , and it can be updated with new applications . On another level , it ’s attractive over the proprietary operating systems because of economic science — with handset selling prices perpetually drop and manufacturer margins under continuing pressure , every dollar counts . Mobile Linux backers say it can deliver on both counts : keeping costs for manufacturers down for downhearted - conclusion , cheap devices since it ’s royalty - free , while also providing an optimal technological environment . The canonical idea is that there will be a baseline version of Linux for mobile devices , and then manufacturers can layer on software to confirm more features and functionality in more - advanced devices .

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Linux use in mobile phones has thus far for the most part been restricted to China , where a identification number of manufacturer support it . There have been a few Linux handsets released by Motorola that have made it to the West , though , and Panasonic and NEC have ship 3 gigabyte phones running Linux in Japan . Symbian remains the prevailing smartphone OS , with nearly two - thirds of the market in the third after part , according to Canalys , with Palm taking about 5 % and Microsoft less than 3 % . But all those Taiwanese phones are tally up : Linux took about 23 % in the one-quarter , up from just 2.2 % in the same period in 2004 .

Smartphones still make up a low percentage of the overall figure of fluid handsets sell — just roughly 13 million out of 205 million or so in the third quarter , or about 6 % — but that shape is grow , and manufacturers are move to push smartphones further down into the grocery store , rather than just position them as gamey - end or business - focused devices . Again , that ’s where the flexibility of Linux comes in . It promises to countenance manufacturing business to standardise on a undivided software platform , instead of the mixing of proprietary closed and smartphone OSes most now use .

That ’s where the biggest problem , lie , though : hammer the introductory platform down into a standardized package , whether it ’s for a unmarried manufacturer or industry - astray . organization like Symbian and Windows Mobile are pretty reproducible from one handset to the next , but that ’s not so with Linux devices . manufacturer often have to implement their own file name extension and applications that terminate up making dissimilar example that all pass Linux incompatible with each other .

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To solve that problem , though , there are a few normalisation efforts . One late - announced one is theMobile Linux Initiativeof the Open Source Development Labs , which aim to make sweetening to the Linux sum to make it more suitable for mobile gimmick , particularly in terms of radio interface , surety and power management — the sort of baseline issues that any operating system on a roving headphone must plow . One major issue is making Linux “ actual - time , ” signify it must be able to respond very quickly to sure interruption , a requisite for some telephone and multimedia app . Giving mobile Linux existent - time capacity mean it could run in a handset with a single processor , rather than the double - processor apparatus that ’s the average in other smartphone OSes .

Standardization efforts like that of the OSDL are crucial not just to make things simple and easier for French telephone manufacturing business ; they ’re crucial to sire support from the enceinte pool of existing Linux developers to create mobile app . J2ME was hype with the promise of write once / run anywhere , but different implementations of it from producer to manufacturer , even handset to handset , as well as technical limitation , kept that from being a reality . Other smartphone bone and drug user interfaces , like Series 60 or Windows Mobile on phone put up developers a coherent environment as well as a blanket range of devices capable of running their applications without having to port them for different phones . If the Linux market remains as fragmented as that of Java , the growth of third - political party applications publish for it will be stunted as well .

Support is grow for fluid Linux , with a figure of manufacturers like Palm , Microsoft and Panasonic saying they ’re looking to shift some , if not most , of their mathematical product lines to it in the spiritualist to retentive full term . Should standardisation efforts take hold and prove successful , a large number of masses should soon be using Linux on their smartphones .

Lesdilley

Carlo Longino is a writer and analyst who fall out the mobile industriousness . He ’s Centennial State - editor ofMobHappy , and also an psychoanalyst forTechdirt . He can be reached at[email protected ] .

Read moreAirtime . The pillar appears every Tuesday on Gizmodo .

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