The Tribune of India has an overview of the various operating systems vying for prominence in the mobile phone sphere: Symbian, Microsoft, Palm, Linux. The article mentions that Samsung, a Microsoft and Palm licensee, has joined the Symbian alliance.
a confusing summary. Not sure I recognised the combattants.
Smartphone being by all accounts quite good?
Symbian devices suffering compatibility problems with each other?
No mention of Motorola’s Linux effort?
Hmm, maybe this is a subject that deserved more depth of research.
What about rolling your own cellphone with Linux, off the shelf parts and some solder? Has anyone ever done this? Would make a great project for rainy autumn evenings
When you can swap the OS on one of these handheld devices easily with another OS.For example-why can’t you get a version of Palm OS 5 to replace PocketPC? Seems to me, this is a growth area for someone……
Don’t forget about Qualcomm BREW. It doesn’t get much press, but with big US companies like Verizon using it, I think it will be around for a while. I see lots of print ads for Verizon’s “Get It Now” service.
The BREW developer tools, though, suck ass.
http://www.symbian.com/technology/standard-java.html
http://www.qualcomm.com/brew/about/whitepaper10.html
You could at least try booting NetBSD on your PocketPC.
http://www.netbsd.org/
It’s already been done: http://www.dr.dk/bertelsen/real/b02_commcan.ram
funny you mentioned netBSD. I wonder when it will be ported to palm and pocketPC hardware. Heh, with a decent onscreen handwriting recognition software you could have a nice little terminal.
How about:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/hpcarm/
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/hpcmips/
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/hpcsh/
No mention of OpenWave either, Eugenia 😉
@all those rallying for linux/bsd on mobile phones etc:
Mobile phones are fundementally different hardware and benefit from operating systems that understand this (e.g. NOS or Symbian). There are aspects like “execution in place” and the different types of memory that are best understood by the kernel. The breed of Linux that Moto will bring to phones, for example, will be a very different beast from that which runs on your desktop.
@all those rallying for linux/bsd on PDAs etc:
hmm, why not?