The Oslo-based ISV said the Qtopia Greenphone is designed to enable commercial and open source developers, in-house software developers, and handset manufacturers to create, modify, and test Linux- based mobile phone applications on a working GSM/GPRS device, making the applications easier to build and faster to bring to market.
Adam Lawson, product director at Trolltech, said the phone comes from Chinese ODM YuHua TelTech (Shanghai) Co Ltd, with which the ISV has had a longstanding relationship. We agreed to take quantities of a device they already had in development and put our software on it, he said. The phone was launched at the LinuxWorld event in San Francisco, with its first destination app developers who already work with Trolltech.
This includes Teleca AB, RealNetworks Inc, Opera Software ASA, and most recently, Openwave Systems Inc, with which a relationship was announced recently. In addition, Lawson said, we have around 150,000 developers with apps that run on our Qt platform [for desktop environments], who will now be able to demo the ability of their apps to migrate to mobile environments on Qtopia.
This is not the first mobile device to run on Linux, or even the first to feature Qtopia as its mobile middleware. That honor goes to the Zaurus from Japanese manufacturer Sharp Corp, but that is a PDA and it is not aimed at the developer community. French MVNO and wireless hotspot operator Neuf Telecom has also recently launched a dual-mode GSM and WiFi phone running Linux and Qtopia, a device it calls the Twin, made by an ODM rumored to be Taiwan’s Wistron Corp.
To give the Greenphone more compelling end-user features, Lawson said Trolltech will ship it to developers with a full set of personal information management capabilities including calendar, contacts, tasks, an email client supporting POP3 and IMAP, calculator, games, media player, SMS, and MMS. We ship it with a CD containing the source code and the rights to alter the apps, so developers can adapt them or replace them completely with their own, as they prefer, he said.
Lawson said Trolltech has also sent a few Greenphones to device manufacturers so that they can test the stacks they are developing for Linux on it. He declined to reveal which companies had received the phone, but it is public knowledge that Motorola Inc has a commitment to Linux and is a Trolltech customer. NEC Corp and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd (Panasonic), which have recently announced a joint venture for mobile handset development, are also actively involved in Linux on account of NTT DoCoMo’s support for the open-source OS as part of its FOMA 3G portfolio.
The announcement by Trolltech is another significant step toward getting Linux on more mobile devices. It came a day after France Telecom SA’s Orange subsidiary became the first major mobile operator to commit to Linux when it announced a deal with Japanese ISV Access Co Ltd to develop Orange-branded phones based on its Linux platform, the first of which is expected in early 2008.
Another important development coming out of LinuxWorld was the announcement by two bodies hitherto working separately on mobile Linux, namely the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Linux Phone Standards (LIPS) Forum, that they would work together on standards. The two were already in many ways complementary in that OSDL is kernel- and OS-focused while LIPS is more about services and APIs, but their alliance is important in a market where fragmentation has been a problem.
Lawson said, until now you’ve had to get the OS from one company, the app platform from another and the apps from a third, so we’re doing lot of alliances with app developers, as well as working with MontaVista and Wind River on the OS side for integrated offerings.
