Linux To Challenge Symbian, Microsoft In Mobile Phone Market - InformationWeek

As the smartphone marketplace matures, Linux will go one of the prima mobile platforms, ABI Research predicted at its fourth estate event in New House Of York City on Thursday, the same twenty-four hours as NXP Semiconductors and Purple Labs unveiled what they claim to be the first 3G Linux telephone under $100.

Carriers worldwide will back up three major mobile operating systems -- Symbian, Linux, and Microsoft, said Gilbert Stuart Carlaw, a mobile and radio analyst at ABI.

"Linux have an unbelievable destabilizing consequence on this market. It will be a manner a new entrant can come up into marketplace without sign language up for the development rhythms of Symbian or Microsoft," Carlaw said.

Linux developers distinguish themselves by introducing a batch of number ones to the smartphone and cell telephone market, or so they claim.

OpenMoko last twelvemonth the first Linux smartphone based completely on unfastened standards. The Neo1973 smartphone, developed in partnership with First International Computer, a maker of motherboards and notebook, PC, and PDA peripherals, utilizes OpenMoko's mobile communication theory platform. All parts of the platform are unfastened sourced, including the user interface layer.

More recently, Red Bend Software the first conception Linux-based mobile telephone that tin be customized and updated with software system and applications over-the-air. Red Bend, a developer of microcode over-the-air mobile client software, partnered with respective companies, including Digital Airways, Opera Software, Synchronica, Trolltech, and Zi to make the necessary constituents for the phone, called Mast.

And this week, NXP Semiconductors, an independent semiconducting material company founded by Philips, and Purple Labs, a provider of embedded mobile Linux components, said they have got jointly developed a 3G Linux mention characteristic telephone that combines picture telephony, music playback, high-speed Internet browsing, and picture streaming, and it bes less than $100. Most multimedia system telephones with similar capablenesses come up with a much heftier terms tag. The phone, called Purple Magic, will be showcased at the Mobile River World United States Congress conference in Barcelona adjacent month.

This twelvemonth is expected to be large for mobile Linux, with like Google choosing Linux as the anchor for its Android platform and international organisations promoting it as the engineering of choice.