Stan Beer
Tuesday, 24 March 2009 12:37
Opinion and Analysis
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A low priced mobile handset capable of running multiple operating
systems in virtual windows and with similar features of much higher
priced smart phones is about to hit the market. The handset will run
Linux and at least one other OS on top of the OKL4 hypervisor from Open
Kernel Labs.
Unfortunately, we can't reveal the name of the
handset vendor but we can tell you that the announcement will be very
soon.
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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