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US-based Open Kernel Labs, a spin-off from Australian tech research group NICTA, is a specialist developer of mobile virtualisation software.
According to senior executives at Open Kernel Labs, the technology in the soon to be announced phone will show that the days of having low cost handsets seamlessly running applications from Symbian, Windows Mobile, Linux and other operating systems side by side are here.
Steve Subar, president and CEO of Open Kernel Labs told iTWire that the announcement and release of the world's first virtualised mobile handset is imminent.
"Open Kernel Labs is the first company to bring virtualisation to mobile devices. Our software today is running on more than 250 million handsets around the world," says Subar
"Our OKL4 product can reduce the cost of devices. This is vitally important to handset OEMs and mobile network operators because of the cost for them to subsidise the device."
According to Subar, virtualisation enables both handset and operators to reduce the cost of low-end to mid-range phones while giving them the same feature rich functionality of high-end smart phones. In fact, this will be a key characteristic of the soon to be announced phone.
"Today, customers and mobile network operators are demanding very sophisticated devices. It's not enough to have a phone that's cheap. It has to be low cost and very sophisticated.
"That sophistication means that it needs to include all kinds of contemporary features, such as MP3 players, cameras, touch capability, high performance, a rich set of applications, browser based access to the Internet. All the sorts of things that just two years ago people thought of as a very high-end smart phone."
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