Study: Linux will be on a third of smart phones in 2012
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Use of Linux as a smart phone platform will grow at more than 75% per year because of initiatives from industry leaders such as Motorola and Intel, a new report claims.
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Even after being on the market for less than half a year, more iPhones sold in the fourth quarter than Windows Mobile phones in the U.S., according to research from Canalys.Canalys researchers estimate that&#160;the iPhone&#160;had 28 percent of the U.S. converged-device market in the fourth quarter of 2007. Research In Motion, with 41 percent, had the largest share of the market. Windows Mobile phones had 21 percent share of devices sold in the quarter, falling into third place behind Apple.Worldwide, the lineup is a bit different. Nokia, which typically dominates around the world but not in the U.S., sold 52.9 percent of smart phones worldwide in the fourth quarter. RIM grew its share of converged-device sales to 11.4 percent, up 121 percent over the same quarter in 2006. Despite its limited availability around the world, Apple took third place with 6.5 percent of the market, just barely squeaking ahead of&#160;struggling Motorola.Apple may have stirred renewed interest in smart phones in the U.S. Converged-device shipments, which include smart phones and wireless handhelds, grew 222 percent in the U.S. during the quarter, according to Canalys.The iPhone also did well in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region, where it became available in three countries partway into the quarter. In the region, Apple came in fifth place behind Nokia, RIM, HTC, and Motorola, but beat out Sony Ericsson, Samsung and Palm, Canalys said.Apple&#39;s success as a new entrant is striking, but it will face challenges to keep its momentum going, said Canalys analyst Pete Cunningham in a statement. Historically, vendors with just one smart phone design, no matter how good, struggle, he said. That means Apple will have to create and refresh a portfolio of devices if it wants to increase its market share, he said.Beyond hardware, competition is continuing in the mobile operating system market. Worldwide Symbian, which credits most sales to Nokia, had 65 percent of the market, followed by Microsoft at 12 percent and RIM at 11 percent, for the fourth quarter, Canalys said.Despite all the buzz around mobile Linux, total Linux phone shipments in 2007 were essentially flat compared to 2006, Canalys found. In Asia Pacific, Motorola had a drop of 28 percent in its Linux smart phone shipments compared to 2006.Phone makers are trying to attract customers to smart phones, which carry a higher price tag than low-end feature phones. However, converged devices made up just 10 percent of the global phone market in 2007, the researchers found.
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Plans call for a Linux-based platform that will be usable in multiple environments, including on PCs, servers and PDAs.
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Maybe smartphones are the Next Big Thing.
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Growing importance of Linux in the enterprise is focus of event.
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Linux is much more popular in the enterprise than previously thought, according to a new report out today. IT research firm IDC combined several of its data studies and threw in a few that it didn&#39;t already
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Forget Windows Mobile 6 -- these open-source handsets might succeed while Linux-on-the-desktop flounders. In Gadget Lab.
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PC Magazine - With Palm&#39;s surprise release of a $600 Linux-based sub-notebook on Wednesday, the company certainly appears to be wandering away from comfortable smartphone territory. The question is: is it too far?
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Research: Businesses are going open source, but OS may still be too technical for most users. The open-source operating system Linux may be gaining a lot of ground in the enterprise space, but Windows will
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The first "open" Linux phone is set to debut at the Consumer Electronics Show, although its capabilities as a music player are still unknown. In Listening Post.
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Netra line of servers will have Linux as an operating system option.
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The Japanese carrier will be standardizing on Symbian for their 3G mobile phone platform, and they will ship 3G phones based on Linux.
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NTT DoCoMo, which recently announced that three of its phones will be based on Linux, invests in US vendor MontaVista Software. By Mobile Pipeline News.
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Google&#39;s Android software platform for mobile phones&#160;is coming to life in Barcelona with a number of chip manufacturers showing it running on prototype or proof-of-concept phones at the Mobile World Congress on Monday.Freescale, Marvell, NEC Electronics, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments all had Android on show. Most of them expect to see Android phones based on their chips on the market in the second half of this year.The hardware ranged from bulky development boards with daughter cards sticking out at unlikely angles to more compact devices small enough to slip into your pocket. All were built around chips containing processor cores designed by Arm, a British fabless semiconductor company.One of the most polished prototypes is on the Texas Instruments stand -- although TI representatives insisted that it&#39;s just an example of how a finished product could look as the company only makes chips, leaving the development of phones to its customers. &quot;We don&#39;t do plastic,&quot; one said.TI actually had Android running on two different devices. One was based on its OMAP850, a single-chip device containing an application processor for Android and a baseband processor for controlling the phone&#39;s radio interface. The other contained TI&#39;s OMAP3430 multimedia application processor, capable of decoding high-definition television signals at a resolution of 720p. It requires a separate baseband processor, and is designed for high-end multimedia phones.Developing software for a new phone typically takes 14 to 18 months, said Ramesh Iyer, mobile Internet device product manager at TI. &quot;Android cuts that dramatically. It&#39;s a disruptor,&quot; he said.Google is shaking the market in other ways, Iyer said. &quot;Android is a single stack. You don&#39;t have to go looking for third-party solutions. Suddenly, they have defragmented the whole Linux ecosystem into one building block,&quot; he said.Android is entering an already crowded market for mobile phone software: To see how crowded, you only had to look at the NEC stand, where four prototypes containing its Medity2 processor were packed onto a narrow table. One was running Symbian OS, one Windows Mobile, one Android on top of Wind River Linux, and the last was running the same Wind River Linux but with a different application layer based on software from Trolltech and Esmertec.NEC staff expressed surprise at the level of interest in Android, saying they expected more attention for the completed phones based on the Medity2 at the next table. Manufactured for NTT DoCoMo, those phones contained the version of Linux promoted by the LiMo Foundation.The two systems are not necessarily in competition, though. With Android&#39;s focus on the application layer and Limo&#39;s work on the middleware, the underlying services needed to link applications to the Linux kernel, the two can be complementary, NEC staff said.Marvell took the prize for the most secretive Android demonstrations, refusing to allow photographs and declining even to say on which of its communications processors the software was running. The company showed a compact handset running the Android interface with a bare minimum of applications and a more complete installation playing video and browsing the Web on a bulky development board. Shrinking that down to a pocket-sized device will not take long, staff said. In fact, they had one ready -- just not loaded with the Android software.Android&#39;s Linux roots are likely to encourage the development of a wave of new handset applications, said Marvell&#39;s marketing director Vish Deshmane.&quot;You will see a lot more software to run on devices from people who want to exploit the commonality with desktop systems. It&#39;s going to be a boon for the 3G world because more applications means more data traffic, so operators will be happy,&quot; he said.Over at Freescale Semiconductor, staff showed Google Maps zooming in on the center of Barcelona on a development board built around Freescale&#39;s i.MX31 processor. This processor is not intended for mobile phones at all, and is more at home in GPS&#160;terminals or media players such as Toshiba&#39;s Gigabit and Microsoft&#39;s Zune.Qualcomm&#39;s demonstration of its 7201 combined baseband and application processor sparkled, but did not exploit the chip&#39;s full potential. The spinning globe of Android&#39;s Global Time application turned smoothly even without the assistance of the 3D graphics hardware acceleration, for which the drivers are not yet ready, said Rob Woodford.Android phones based on the chip will go on sale in the second half of this year, Woodford said -- but U.S. readers should contain their excitement: the Qualcomm display was overshadowed by a card warning that&#160;it may be prohibited from shipping the products on show to the U.S.&#160;because of a Dec. 31 court injunction obtained by chip rival Broadcom in a patent infringement case.The Mobile World Congress runs through Thursday at the Fira de Barcelona showground.
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(InfoWorld) - Palm plans to announce a new type of mobile device on Wednesday as it continues its product-line transition from simple PDAs to more advanced smartphones. Consumer electronics vendors are rushing to develop handsets that offer mobile e-mail and Internet browsing instead of merely calendars and contact lists. Apple added fuel to this fire in January when CEO Steve Jobs announced he would launch the iPhone in June, combining the iPod music player with a digital camera, smartphone, and touchscreen display. Now Palm is telling industry watchers that founder Jeff Hawkins will unveil the new device during his talk at a trade show in Carlsbad, California called D: All Things Digital. Palm is keeping quiet about the details, even declining to brief industry analysts ahead of the announcement. But one possibility is theÂ Linux-based smartphoneÂ that Palm CEO Ed Colligan has promised to release before the end of 2007. Such a device would improve performance compared to Palm's current Treo by running the Palm OS on top of a Linux kernel, Colligan told analysts at the company's annual investor day in April. Palm will also continue to use Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS. In the PDA segment,Â vendors used Windows on 62.1 percent of handsets in the first quarter of 2007, compared to just 0.7 percent for Linux, according to Gartner. By continuing to develop applications on both tracks, Palm hopes to win customers by offering them more options with its Treo smartphone than competitors like Research in Motion's BlackBerry, Motorola's Q, and Samsung's BlackJack. Another possibility for Palm is to re-architect its Treo into a more stylish, consumer-friendly device, said analyst Jack Gold, founder of the research firm J. Gold Associates. "They are being left behind by the likes of BlackBerry and Nokia and Moto as far as device design goes," Gold said. "I wouldn't be surprised to see a new navigation paradigm but not too far away form a standard phone. They don't want to lose their bread and butter clients, who are mostly business users who want an e-mail device."
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Linux is gaining ground with companies but Windows will continue to dominate consumer PCs in the near future. That is the non-contentious conclusion of the latest IDC research.
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Plus: Linux demand lifts Red Hat profit...Strong sales of phones, other gadgets boost PalmOne profit...Lawson expects quarterly loss.