Virtualised multiple OS mobile handset to hit market

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 24 March 2009 12:37

Opinion and Analysis

Subar believes the announcement of the new type virtualised phone will be disruptive to the smart phone market.

"The innovation here is that OKL4 through virtualisation has enabled the announcement of the availability of very powerful, sophisticated and capable phones at a feature phone price not a smart phone price," Subar says.

The OKL4 technology, according to Subar, enables handsets to run mutiple operating systems on a single core processor rather than high cost processors with multiple cores.

"This cuts the bill of materials cost for the OEM by US$10-15 per handset and that translates into a US$30-45 reduction for a mobile network operator. Since feature phones is the segment that is subsidised by carriers, it's also the segment that's under tremendous price pressure.

"The benefit of OKL4 in this instance is a very high end device that provides smart phone functionality at a single-core virtualised feature phone price."

In plain language, Subar is saying that starting with the new phone that's about to hit the market, a new class of phone has arrived that can do the same things as smart phones at about half the price.

Subar also says that this new class of virtualised feature phones will be heaven for developers because they'll be capable of running any applications that can run on the current range of Symbian, Linux and Windows Mobile devices.

Once again, we're sorry that we're not allowed to reveal the name of the vendor but we can say that you won't have to wait long to find out.