Linux to be big in smartphones

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 29 August 2007 05:13

Business IT - Technology

Linux is being tipped as the fastest growing smartphone OS over the next five years and set to account for 31 percent of all smartphones on the market by 2012.

Market research firm, ABI Research, is forecasting a compound annual growth rate for Linux based smartphones in excess of 75 percent. Research director Stuart Carlaw, said: "Serious initiatives from the likes of Intel and Access are gathering pace and momentum, whilst the carrier community continues to identify Linux as one of the few operating systems that it intends to support in its long-term plans." Palm announced earlier this year that its future smartphones would use Linux.

According to another market researcher Canalys, Symbian presently dominates the smartphone OS market with a 72.5 percent share in 2006.

Carlaw added, "Linux is benefiting from growing support in the handset OEM community, most notably Motorola, but also Nokia with less traditional types of devices aimed at mobile broadband applications. The rise of mobile broadband and the impact that this has upon device convergence and format plays into the hands of Linux."

Another recent survey, by Evans Data Corporation, identified Nokia's S60 application development platform, which runs on Symbian, as the most popular with developers everywhere except North America.

The future  for Linux is not entirely rosy, however. ABI says: "The vertical and horizontal fragmentation that has plagued this market continues to be a concern..[and] the recent patent infringement assertions from Microsoft - that Linux, in its generic form, infringes upon 235 of its patents - is an ongoing concern. Many Linux pundits point to this as being old hat, while others indicate that there is no smoke without fire."