On 25/09/09 00:10, Chris Dennis wrote:
> > Hello Folks
> >
> > I've just stumbled across a news item[1] which mentions LiMo[2],
> > apparently "the first truly open, hardware-independent, Linux-based
> > operating system for mobile devices".
> >
> > Vodafone have just announced a new phone that will run LiMo; their
> > page[3] manages not to mention Linux at all, of course. Or a price.
> >
> > Any thoughts about how LiMo compares with Android[4]? Or any of the
> > other shiny toys that are 'coming soon'[5]?
LiMo [1] has been going for a while now and is very common in Japan and
other SE Asia countries. The main players are Motorola, Panasonic and
Samsung. If you want to buy one in this country go for any of the
Motorola smart phones such as the MOTOROKR E8. Altogether LiMo has been
shipped on > 40 handsets with total sales in the 10's millions (I guess:
I could not find an actual number). LiMo has a low profile partly
because the manufacturers don't mention Linux anywhere - in fact they
don't say anything about the operating system in any of their phones.
Andriod is the new kid on the block, with a rather different agenda to
LiMo. Google want to create a platform to run their applications and to
have an app store like Apple. Any Android phone can participate. True
there is only the one Andriod phone at the moment but that is going to
change real soon. Expect a flood of them by Christmas and for it to
appear on Netbooks and set top boxes early next year. Believe me,
Android is going to be big. [2]
The question is: is Android really Linux? It certainly is not GNU/Linux
because all the GNU components have been replaced with BSD licensed
equivalents - for example the c library, bionic, replaces glibc. The
programming environment supported by Google is Java with 'C' a poor
relation. I don't think C++ is supported at all. The other change is
that the kernel is a heavily patched 2.6.27. The patches are available
but have not been merged upstream. Hopefully they will one day, but the
Google developers have been criticised for developing everything
privately and then dumping large patches without much discussion.
Is Android a good thing? Probably, yes. It has got a lot of attention in
the embedded Linux world (the one I inhabit) and may form a nucleus for
standardisation, which is a big drag on embedded Linux at the moment.
Final comment: whether it is Android or not, the future of mobile
devices is Linux. When you think about it, there are only a few options:
Symbian (only for Nokia - who seem to be moving towards Linux anyhow -
see the N900 and similar), Mac OS X (only for Apple - and it is a BSD
core), MS Windows Mobile (fill in your own comments here) or Linux.
Which is the cheapest and most cross platform? Which one do you think
handset manufacturers will adopt?
Bye for now,
Chris Simmonds
[1]
http://www.limofoundation.org/
[2]
http://www.embedded-europe.com/220100741
--
Chris Simmonds 2net Limited
chris@??? http://www.2net.co.uk/
