Whither Mobile Linux?
Motorola made a lot of noise last year when it said it would start using Linux for handsets. The hardest of the hardcore geeks' ears perked up, and analysts spelled doom for Symbian and Microsoft. But more than a year later, Linux has failed to set the mobile industry on fire. But BusinessWeek says, yes, Linux is still coming to a phone near you.
Only 1.1 million Linux-based phones will ship in 2004, Strategy Analytics says, though that may be an overly generous estimate, since there are just a handful of Linux handsets on sale, almost exclusively in Asia. But a director from MontaVista Software, one of the leading suppliers of Linux for mobile phones, says "every single mobile-phone maker is looking at Linux."
That may sound impressive, but it really isn't that surprising to think that the major device manufacturers are, at the very least, investigating Linux. After all, MontaVista has been bragging on its top-tier customers since at least January 2003, and Motorola's two Chinese phones have represented the extent of the tidal wave.
Clearly companies like MontaVista and Mizi have shrunk the OS down and made it suitable for mobile phones, so what's stopping Linux? A lot of misconceptions, really. The first is that just because Linux is open source, it's free. While that could be true for a manufacturer that took Linux and customized it on its own for handsets, most license a specialized version of the OS. While they're probably paying less than the $5 to $7 Symbian or Microsoft charge for their operating systems, it's still not free. And what phone makers save by licensing Linux for a smartphone may not measure up to to advantages that going with Windows Mobile or Symbian may provide.
