Stan Beer
Wednesday, 16 August 2006 05:40
Your IT -
Mobility
Trolltech, a Norwegian based Linux supplier for mobile phones, has announced a new mobile phone that the company believes will serve as a platform for Linux developers to design the cell phones of the future, including customised models.
The GSM/GPRS handset, called the Greenphone, will be aimed at
developers rather than consumers, supplied with open source software
code enabling developers to build features customised to target markets.
In addition to the major handset manufacturers developing Linux phones
for the mass market, Trolltech believes that the platform will make it
economically feasible for specially customised phones to be developed
and manufactured under contract by large enterprises to meet the needs
of their staff.
A water or power utility for instance could have phones specially
designed to despatch jobs for field operations staff using instant
messaging.
What will be supplied for US$690 is a vanilla handset with a fair-sized
colour screen and 1.3 megapixel camera, plus a complete Linux software
development kit that enables developers the freedom to innovate,
develop the functions and populate the screen with the icons that they
believe will make a product a winner for their target market.
It would seem that Trolltech aims to make the Greenphone the IBM PC of
the mobile phone industry, using its own version of an industry
standard architecture, with Linux as the operating system platform.
However, while the Trolltech platform has the support of mobile phone
giant Motorola, Linux still has a way to go to displace the number one
mobile operating system platform Symbian, which is supported by Nokia,
Siemens, Panasonic and Sony Ericsson, among others, and is currently
installed on hundreds of millions of handsets worldwide.