From NewMobileComputing: Operating systems do make a difference in mobile phones, writes Wireless Center Editor Guy Kewney—and Linux is looking stronger every day, eWEEK says. On other embedded news, LynuxWork’s BlueCat Linux 5.0, based on a 2.6-series Linux kernel, is now available for public beta testing, with a projected final release date set for November. LynuxWorks claims this to be the first public availability of embedded Linux based on the new kernel. Key new features include: improved kernel preemption; 0(1) scheduler; improved POSIX threading support.
Symbian Vs Linux: Who Will Win in Wireless? First 2.6 Embedded Linux
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Well this should be interesting.
1-The embedded market is quite a bit bigger than the PC market.
2-Quick! Grab a map of China. What’s the easiest way to get phone service in there?
3-National governments that want control of their own futures.
4-Cost and support.
The 5-10 year time frame is going to be interesting.
BTW The above also holds for Africa as well.
I vote for Symbian ! I’m still a daily user of a beloved Psion Netbook, and the Symbian (EPOC-5) running on it just make me forget about the old hardware.
Now if only I could install the latest Symbian on it …
Except that on the very same day the eweek article was published, Motorola and Microsoft announced their Windows Mobile-based Smartphones.
Symbian is quite nice and the P800 looked fantastic but why did you leave Palm and MS off the list. The new samsung flip phone (i500 i think) that ships with palm is quite nice. The treo 600 is also impressive. The MS phones and software actually look really nice don’t know about the pricing and stability though.
Still this not a two dog race. I think this will break down to geography. Symbian will likely be most popular in Europe and amongst european vendors (like nokia). The other stuff will be supported by Asian and US vendors and operators throughout the world.
I also see a chance that symbian will eventually = nokia which could lead to other major vendors decreasing support for it. Now if symbian = nokia that is still good. NOkia = 40% of the mobile phone market.
This is actually a strike against Bluecat. Embedded distributions need to be stable – not released at cutting-edge timelines. Are they also going to have a separate beta release for each revision of the kernel? Any schmoe can compile a kernel and throw it into their distribution for testing.
I tested out Linux 2.6 on a high-load system which also acts as an NFS server for 7 diskless clients. It lasted about a half day until the interrupt handler broke and all device drivers went into infinite retry loops. I don’t see how a complete Linux 2.6-based distribution could consider itself production ready in 2 months… the kernel stability isn’t there, let alone the userspace.
Every time I step off an airplane and start my phone I think 5 seconds feel far to much. Ehrm… then someone suggest a phone that takes 2 minutes to start?
Symbian and Palm, please keep up your brilliant work…
it’s the time it takes to select the network (and other stuff going on at the air interface) and then to do the magic in the VLA and HLA.
Please try to remember: with mobile phones, the OS is not the bottleneck during boot-up. Write this sentence 100 times.
Great! I can’t wait to finally get those POSIX message queue calls available, rather than the traditional SysV ones :-)…