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Open Kernel Labs joins Symbian Foundation

Categories: Announcements, Symbian
By: , IntoMobile
Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 4:02 AM

Open Kernel Labs

Symbian Foundation has recently scored a new member. It’s Open Kernel Labs, which is provider of embedded virtualization software for mobile phones and broadband internet devices. The idea behind their move is to “support the growing demand for mobile devices that are virtualized with OKL4, and rely on the Symbian operating system (OS).”

Commenting on the announcement, OK Labs’ CEO Steve Subar said: “The partnership with Symbian reflects our ongoing commitment to delivering superior technology to the mobile device market. The combination of the most widely used Smartphone OS, Symbian, and OKL4, the most widely used open source embedded virtualization solution, brings an unprecedented degree of integration and collaboration to mobile application developers, device OEMs and network operators.”

For the record, OKL4 is the only commercially deployed embedded virtualization solution for mobile phones, with shipments approaching 250 million units in 2008…

[Via: SymbianFreak]

About The Author

Dusan Belic

Dusan has been using smartphones since their introduction and is now following the latest trends in the industry. The "convergence" is what he's most excited about, and writing about it is the next logical thing to do. He thinks that using a smartphone is what everyone who cares about their time should do. In addition to his interests in mobile phones, Dusan also loves to experiment with the latest web and mobile 2.0 services. The idea of accessing and managing your information from any device no matter where you are simply amazes him. Whether it's an online to-do list, note taking service or a video sharing social network, he's there to try it out. He admits though, he's still searching for the ultimate web-based organizational tool, which "sings" perfectly with the mobile PIM application. Dusan used to run SymbianWatch.com which later became part of IntoMobile. He lives in Serbia, South-East Europe, from where he edits the site on a daily basis.

  • Brosephus

    To be entirely accurate – OKLabs 250M units shipped were NOT used in virtualized phones. They were microkernel-based real-time OS – but not virtualized phones. These claims are not correct. In fact, if you look at their recent press releases they state that they are about to ship the first virtualized phone (which is true). . .so then what happened to the 250M phones they claimed to have shipped? They can’t keep their story straight.

    For the record VMware and Virtualogics also have commercially-available virtualization software for mobile phones and apparently both will be shipping end of 2009 or early-2010. Virtualization for mobile is heating-up!

  • gernot

    The original statement is actually fairly accurate: OKL4 is indeed the only commercially-deployed mobile virtualization solution, and it is on over 300M phones (the first ones shipped three years ago!)

    You are correct that not all of this is on virtualized phones. OKL4 is used in many ways, including supporting the baseband stack on many phones, demonstrating its real-time capability.

    You are definitely wrong in claiming that OK Labs “claims to be shipping the first virtualized phone soon”. Fact is that the Motorola Evoke, which runs the baseband stack and Linux in different virtual machines on the same processor core, has been selling to end users since May — you can get one too if you want.

    In contrast, no phone out there is sold with either VirtualLogix or VMware virtualization software (whether used for virtualization or not), only claims that it will happen sometime next year. So they are years behind.