Andrew Till, director of customer strategy with the Schaumburg, Illinois-based telecoms equipment vendor told ComputerWire that Linux remains at the heart of its long-term handset strategy. The admission comes despite little in the way of tangible support from Motorola for the open source operating system since the company publicly staked its future on the technology almost a year ago.
Till said there would probably be announcements at 3GSM and CeBit in February and March, regarding Motorola’s updated plans for Linux-based mobile devices. In addition, he intimated there will be more products coming throughout 2005 and 2006.
So far, the company’s A760, A768 and E680 models have only seen significant exposure in Chinese-speaking markets. The business-oriented A780 seems not yet to have enjoyed a commercial launch.
The imperative to use the platform remains the same, said Till. There’s a need to move to a more open, flexible architecture for the majority of handsets and [to provide] a more open developer platform, he said. The great thing [about Linux] is that some of the brightest minds are helping develop it.
What is perhaps more surprising is the extent to which Till believes Linux may be relevant for mobile handsets as a whole, rather than just higher-end smart phones. In terms of functionality, if you’re building a handset to a very low price point, just voice and text, then you won’t see a Linux-based solution, he said. But where there’s push to talk, cameras [etc], then we believe it has a strong role to play in swapping out [proprietary operating systems].
Using Linux also helps overcome some of the limitations of Motorola’s other favored handset application platform, mobile Java (J2ME). Some applications may be less suitable for Java. For instance, if you need to write to the kernel, he said.
Despite owning its own portfolio of embedded Linux assets, acquired with the purchase of Embedix in late 2002, Motorola appears settled on the consumer electronics Linux variant from MontaVista Software as the basis for its handsets.
At the moment the plan is to use MontaVista. That’s what we’ve licensed. The value we bring is by adding new applications and services and features, said Till.
Meanwhile, he said Microsoft’s Windows Mobile has emerged as the key device platform in the enterprise space while Symbian OS is gaining traction for both business and multimedia users.
We see Microsoft as a key partner, especially in the enterprise, he said. The .NET framework is unmatched as a platform for developers especially when you’re extending access to backend systems. Symbian is very open and easy to customize the user interface. Again there’s some activity in the enterprise but we see it as more appropriate for multimedia applications.
Motorola builds handsets based on both systems in addition to its Linux activities.
