VMware to take virtualisation to mobile phones

by Stuart Corner

Tuesday, 11 November 2008

Page 1 of 2 ! VMware has unveiled plans to bring virtualisation to mobile phones through the new VMware Mobile Virtualisation Platform (MVP), based on technology it acquired from Trango Virtual Processors in October 2008. VMware claims that VMware MVP will help handset vendors reduce development time and get mobile phones with value-added services to market faster, and enable end users to run multiple profiles – for example, one for personal use and one for work use – on the same phone. (Nokia has already introduced this functionality on its recently released E71). VMware president and CEO, Paul Maritz, said: "By abstracting the applications and data from the hardware itself, we expect that virtualisation will not only enable handset vendors to accelerate time to market but can also pave the way for innovative applications and services for phone users. We look forward to working closely with our partners to bring new mobile solutions to market faster." VMware describes MVP as "a thin layer of software that will be embedded on a mobile phone that decouples the applications and data from the underlying hardware," and promises that it will be optimised to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones. It explains that "Today, handset vendors spend significant time and effort getting new phones to market due to the use of multiple chipsets, operating systems and device drivers across their product families. The same software stack does not work across all the phones and, therefore, must be ported separately for each platform. This process is slow and expensive and ultimately slows time to market... "MVP will virtualise the hardware, enabling handset vendors to develop a software stack with an operating system and a set of applications that is not tied to the underlying hardware. This will enable the vendors to deploy the same software stack on a wide variety of phones without worrying about the underlying hardware differences." However VMware does not explain how this applies when many vendors already use common platforms across multiple devices, such as Nokia's S40 and S60, not to mention the growing momentum behind Symbian, Android, LiMo and Microsoft Windows Mobile. The Trango Hypervisor on which MVP will be based is claimed to allows silicon vendors and OEMs to run multiple secure native execution environments on both single core and multi-core platforms. It is claimed to be available for most operating systems including Linux 2.6 and Microsoft Windows CE. In June Trango announced that it had partnered with Symbian to extend the benefits of virtualisation to the Symbian ecosystem. Trango was founded in 2004 in France. CONTINUED << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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