Study: Financial Squeeze Pressuring Mobile Manufacturers to Use Linux
By Simon Sage on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 10:24 AM PST In Financial/Corporate News, Linux, Research
The LiMo foundation welcomed lots of new members today, and according to recent research, it’s due in a large part to economic conditions favouring a license-free operating system.
“There are multiple factors driving the growth of the market for Linux in mobile handsets. In the current economy, the need to manage costs has pushed OEMs and operators toward the potential licensing and royalty savings available with Linux,” commented IMS Research analyst Chris Schreck. “At the same time, consolidation in the Linux market and work by standards groups like the LiMo Foundation, Open Mobile Terminal Platform, the Open Handset Alliance, and the Open Mobile Alliance have gone a long way to remove the fragmentation that had hindered market growth. The end result is a mobile market driven to Linux to save on development costs and a Linux developer community more capable of meeting that demand than ever before.”
Android, something riding considerable popularity right now, is a prime example of a successful Linux-based OS, and Palm (NSDQ: PALM)’s WebOS has also shown that Linux still has more than a few tricks tucked away.
[via IMS]
I made an experiment with a regular Linux desktop distro called XUbuntu (a lightweight version of Ubuntu).
I created a virtual machine with only 256 Mb RAM and installed XUbuntu. It used only 130Mb, and ran perfectly well.
Here’s a screenshot:
http://i40.tinypic.com/vfj9k3.png
When I opened Firefox, memory usage went to 180Mb — but I still could use the computer without swapping.
Linux is the perfect solution for netbooks with limited resources, not only because it is free (with reduces the overall cost by $30), but because it requires much less resources (with can reduce the overall cost by other $30).
That means that a Linux netbook will cost at least $60 less than a Windows netbook; that’s 20% to 30% of the netbook price.
I would hope in the future, the Linux portion of the various mobile platforms would converge. After all, the hardware will essentially be the same and that is what the OS manages.
In terms of the application framework above it, it seems conceivable that there could be an Android stack, a LiMo stack, a Pre stack and even a Blackberry or Symbian stack.
Essentially, the “community” would share in the development/support of the OS, simplifying the lives of the component vendors (few drivers, etc.), while the stacks above would allow the device vendors to differentiate their products.