Mobile Carriers Cry "Less Operating Systems" 217
A NYTimes story says "Multiple systems have hampered the growth of new services, mobile phone executives say. " The story does a good job of capturing some of the changing dynamics in the mobile OS market — but rightly raises the point that given the sheer size of the mobile market, it's unlikely we're going to see the homogenization we have in the desktop market.
Shome mishtake shurely? (Score:5, Informative)
I know they have trouble adding-up, but jeez...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know about "awful", but it is wrong. "Operating systems" is a count noun, not a non-count noun [wikipedia.org]. To be sure, fewer people will recognize that it's wrong (and fewer still will know its name) than if the Times had made a common error, like substituting a possessive for a contraction, but that doesn't make it right.
Instead of less mistakes, we should strive for fewer.
--not-your-friendly-neighborhood-grammar-snob
(That'd be my sweetie.)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
of course not. The Times' headline is "As Mobile Phones Grow More Complex, Carriers Insist on Fewer Operating Systems". Typos happen, but never like that in a newspaper headline. The blame is 100% on the illiterate Slashdot editor (regardless of what was submitted, editors are supposed to be quality control).
Re: (Score:2)
Awful mistake (Score:2)
Re:Shome mishtake shurely? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Shome mishtake shurely? (Score:4, Informative)
For those who don't get it, fewer is for things you can count, less is for things you can't.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot would be less annoying if there were fewer grammar Nazi's.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Slashdot would be less annoying if there were fewer grammar Nazis.
Apostrophe Nazi and proud!
Not Quite Sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
int main() works, but
innt mayn() doesn't
So why is it that people who are proud of their fluency in C++, or whatever, are proud to sound like a drooling mouth-breather in English?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Shome mishtake shurely? (Score:5, Funny)
operating: No such file or directory
systems: No such file or directory
Cygwin doesn't like it either.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
didnt realize
Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
I sincerely hope so. More competition -> better products.
Right now if a mobile phone gets popular it's because it has features that more people want, not because 'everyone else uses that one'. That's the way it should be.
Now if only we could get the desktop market to behave that way.
Re:Good! (Score:5, Funny)
That ones popular because they've made a dozen pretty version of it. That phone is being treated like an accessory to an outfit rather than something to talk to people with.
If that trend continues, we'll end up with phones that you can't actually use with a plan...because they don't actually do anything except make cool noises (i.e. you can't communicate to other people with 'em).
Re: (Score:2)
On the other hand, it does crash a lot more often than you would expect from such a feature-poor phone. However, from a physical standpoint it's hard to get it to break.
Personally, I'm thinking of trading it in for something a little more feature rich. I figure, if my phone is going to freak out and reboot itself in the middle of a conversation once or twice a m
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't have a Razr, nor have I ever owned one, but damn, that sounds like a hell of a lot of customers being ripped off...
Re:Good! (Score:4, Funny)
I'm amused that this is listed as a "feature" of a telephone.
Re: (Score:2)
Hello! You do not know what the fuck you are talking about.
I have a RAZR V3i. I've made some pretty major drops to it, some on the corners and some flat. It's barely even been scratched. I'd say the RAZR is at least twice as scratch-resistant as the V555, my last phone. The only thing that's ever happened to it when I've dropped it is the battery cover flies off.
Also, it has all the features I need in a cellphone
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
a mobile phone gets popular because it's "pretty". case in point: the razr which is functionally worthless, hella expensive, and in the purses or pockets of nearly every human in the continental united states.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It fulfils a market need - therefore it's popular.
Slashdot geeks that want bricks that run linux and have every feature under the sun are a *very* tiny minority of phone users.
Say what you will about Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
However, in my mind only one OS could possibly fill the bill for all mobile devices, and that's Linux. Linux is easily and readily modifiable, not just by license, but by the way it's grown into a modular kernel that's fairly platform agnostic these days, one that can be stripped down to the tiniest sizes if necessary.
If I had one mobile OS to choose from -- well, Linux would be it. And it's not just because I'm a Linux-using geek, but because it really is the best tool for the job.
Re:Say what you will about Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
There isn't a good standardization system under Linux to provide anything that looks like the homogenization that you suggest. Every distribution does a lot of things a little differently than the next, and if every carrier makes their own, I can see that the flexibility is a double-edged swo
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you mean the growth of the PC in the 1980s, with all those DOS clones that have since died, or the growth of the PC in the 1990s, with about 4 flavours of Windows to choose from, not to mention all the x86 unices that were being born around that time? The PC was about the only major desktop machine in those days with a choice of OS, and the hardware it
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Come on now. I am as much a Linux zealot as the next Slashdot'er, but even I have to say that most versions of Windows were better then 90% compatible with each other. Incompatibilities were the exception not the rule.
It's the platform which matters, not the kernel (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux is a kernel. A pretty good one, I grant, but it only provides kernel services. The key to a mobile device is what sits on top of the kernel, and Linux has less of a good story to tell. Look at Windows mobile or Symbian and you'll notice that they each provide a well-defined set of telephony oriented services and APIs and a set of applications which use these.
If you want to build a product based on Symbian or Windows Mobile, you basically just have to implement a set of well-defined APIs and device drivers for your platform and you're good to go. While this is far from being a trivial undertaking, it provides a stable environment for 3rd party application developers, who stand a reasonable chance that their application will work as expected on any device supporting the OS.
The Linux situation is fast-developing, but there's no question that the rich telephony middleware layer isn't really there yet. There are a variety of different consortia, all of which have websites with "white papers" and some of which have formal API documents. To my knowledge, however, none has anything close to a complete, commercial quality implementation of a reasonably full suite of telephony middleware and user applications. I don't doubt that this will eventually arrive (there's a lot of pressure in that direction), but there's no 'standard' that I can see.
Let's just look at UI and application framework: there are at least two common options and a rich variety of more-or-less unsupported options: QTopia (which is probably the most mature right now, but costs $$$) and GTK+ (which is free but less mature on embedded platforms). If I'm an application developer, which do I target. Unlike Linux desktop machines, most of which resolve the problem by installing most of the libraries for both, space is at a premium on mobile devices - so QTopia devices require QT for the UI (and lock out GTK+ applications) and GTK+ devices do the converse. This is important to operators as a QTopia based phone is sufficiently different to a GTK+ based phone that they would really need to treated as separate platforms even though the kernel is the same.
At least the UI frameworks exist and work pretty well. What about the code to do things like:
* Manage a SIM-based phonebook
* Interface with a CDMA or UMTS modem (which needs to be specified
in an abstract way to support the many different chipsets out there)
* Implement the SIM toolkit
* Implement all of the user notifications required for SMS, supplementary
services, SIM and so on.
* Gracefully manage multiple network connections in a seamless manner
(upmarket device probably has cellular packet service, Bluetooth,
WiFi, possibly tethered connection to desktop machine, IrDA,
* Secure update of the software images on the device
* Over the air provisioning of connections and services
I could go on, but I guess the point is made.
Sadly, Linux for embedded mobile devices risks becoming marginalized by a repeat of the 'desktop wars': several incompatible implementations of some pretty basic services which end up fragmenting the market because none achieves critical mass. Success means reducing the number of 'initiatives' (probably to one) and showing us the code. Enough of the white papers...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
no repeat (Score:3, Insightful)
And this is different from Symbian, how?
so QTopia devices require QT for the UI (and lock out GTK+ applications) and GTK+ devices do the converse
That's incorrect; GPE is based on X11, and it can run Qt applications. Furthermore, the amount of space the Qt libraries take is not that large.
QTopia (which is probably the most mature righ
Re: (Score:2)
Linux takes way too much space for an embedded OS and REQUIRES a 32-bit cpu. It's also quite complex and therefore better suited to larger and more featureful devices. Even there, the numerous distributions lack of standards and standardized packaging and nonstandard GUI hampers it.
That's the reason why PalmOS, Symbian, QNX and wxworks exist. Not to mention eCos, uOS, FreeRTOS etc. Linux is not simply the best tool for the job. Linux is the best tool for certai
Re: (Score:2)
If you're not using all the features of the kernel you can strip it down (2.6 is even more modular than previous) and get it under a megabyte. You can use fbui [comcast.net] and for another ~50kB get a gui with a window mangler in the kernel. uClinux [uclinux.org] runs on [uclinux.org] more limited systems (including those without MMUs). It runs on several 16 bit platforms, for example H8 300S [elecdesign.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Umm... No, it wasn't the ubiquity of Windows, but rather the fact that it ran on almost all common (cheap) hardware. The reason the Mac failed in the 90s was because they didn't allow anyone to make clones, but Windows ran on cheap generic hardware (Intel, AMD, and even Cyrix... remember them) and anything could usually run on it.
So it was decentralization
Re: (Score:2)
In order to arrive at the right answer you have to be considering the right question. It's clear, and the market proves it, that you aren't.
Linux may desire to scale optimally to the smallest devices but that doesn't mean it's optimal at doing so. Furthermore, many manufacturers won't consider the GPL. Linux is only a kernel as well and UI is critical to mobile devices.
There are plenty of platforms as
Re: (Score:2)
How did you evaluated all the other alternatives, for instance Inferno or Plan 9 ?
Lucent use RT plan9 in their Cellphone base stations so I'm pretty sure it can cope with being on a handset.
How did the two comapre to Lunix ?
Re: (Score:2)
And Microsoft uses Windows Server 200x to run Exchange which Windows Mobile devices cunnect to, so I'm pretty sure you could put Windows Server 200x on a cellphone.
Oh wait, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever either.
Are you talking about reliability? Linux is used, well, everywhere.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure that Windows Mobile doesn't share much source code with Vista.
Whereas I know that plan9 and plan9 RT are virtually the same. I watched Sape Mullender do a talk on it.
Re: (Score:2)
Our needs (Score:5, Funny)
You know, something we can praise for setting standards and reducing overall expense now, and hate for existing later on.
cell phone companies have hampered the growth more (Score:4, Interesting)
I once tried to get a windows mobile phone and they said that you must pay for 2 years for data + voice to get it at the deal price.
T-mobile is cutting off data / internet to non T-mobile apps on some of there phones.
others lock down Bluetooth to force you to use there network, and some have internet data limits.
The I-phone is cool but they only want you to use payed for apps on it.
Re:cell phone companies have hampered the growth m (Score:2)
You're complaining that you have to sign a contract in order to get a huge discount on your phone? If you don't like the terms of the contract, don't sign it. Pay full retail, or buy a different phone. I don't like that BMWs are so expensive, but I don't begrudge them the right to set their prices. Sorry, had to get a car analogy in there.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know which version of windows mobile you're using, but have never seen *ONE* of those complaints on my phone, with the exception of the activesync issue.
Since I don't have SMS issues, can use MP3 for ringtones, and don't have misspelling prompts, I'm thinking you're using a carrier modified version of the phone's firmware. Please complain to your carrier, not to
Note: I'm a linux desktop user, and a Symbian user. But even I can't stand this much fud.
Ah-diddums. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, instead of crying about possible missed new lock-ins because it's too much effort to write the shackling software they should just shut-up and let the phone makers produce phones that the public want rather than those designed purely for the mobile telco's mean, narrow minded, penny pinching marketing departments.
Re: (Score:2)
QFT. I mean, where would they be if they couldn't charge me 10 bucks a month for an extra feature that costs them essentially nothing? What we really need is for cell companies to get the hell out of the phone business.
Re: (Score:2)
Waaaaah! (Score:5, Interesting)
They're just upset because they put a lot of research and development into stripping the features out of phones that they find inconvenient, and having multiple systems means they need to spend that much more in tech so that they can hamper the new devices similarly.
I mean, they CAN'T just let the phones be, can they? If they did, then the phones would have the out-of-the-box capability to transfer ringtones and wallpapers 'n whatnot directly from people's PCs, or from web sites OTHER than the carriers!
New OSes have *nothing* to do with the fact that adoption is being hampered. It's the greed of the telcos that are hampering things, because they demand that phones be completely locked down so users are ONLY allowed to do what the telcos want, like paying 4 bucks for crappy renditions of Madonna songs.
Re: (Score:2)
Phones follow standards [like GSM or CDMA]. All the carrier needs is your ID (ESN, SIM number, etc). The rest doesn't matter. Unless you want to lock your "users" into half-usable phones.
Tom
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
... And this has the following effect: NO MATTER how much you pay for a phone, you can't get any of the features you really want. The only way you can get the features you want, is by forgoing the carrier's subsidy (which you STILL have to pay as part of your mandatory contract) and getting an unlocked phone directly from the manufacturer.
Which means that, in order to get out of paying for $4.00 MP3 ringtones and wallpapers, or $29.99 for a terminal/ssh client, you have to spend about $200.00 upfront -- p
Re: (Score:2)
I made the mistake of buying an upgraded phone when I got my first mobile phone. Never again.
Re: (Score:2)
I know nobody wants to admit it... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm still looking forward to Linux and Click and Run technology -- that is the first step of many needed to start surpassing Windows on the desktop.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
ROFL -- so true :D (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
All it really takes is for the dev team to use t
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Good question, given that "look like ass" is highly variable from person to person. I think Windows apps look like ass. YMMV.
"Third rate knock off" ignorance aside, it's a cross-platform development framework. Just one more example. I can't vouch for how bloated or n
Re: (Score:2)
You can click and run most common GUI applications in both Gnome and KDE (and others) out of the box. In fact, this firefox browser was brought up through a menu. Weee. Whomever modded your post up, hey it's not 1994 anymore.
As for portability
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There already quite a few random GUI installers for Linux though. UT2K4 [the game] uses one. So do Samsung laser printer drivers.
Tom
Re: (Score:2)
But this is why Microsoft is actually a good thing on the desktop market.
Operating system advancement has been slow as molasses and almost always driven by someone other than MS. To argue that MS is a good thing for the desktop market is so wrongheaded it makes me want to send Gary Coleman to your home or business with orders to bitchslap.
'm all for using different OSes, but the sheer number of applications available for a single OS (And in this case it happens to be Windows) is staggering compared to how bad it COULD have been had we had multiple OSes that were popular.
I think your cause and effect are completely backwards. Because there is one dominant OS, most software is not designed to be cross platform and MS has the power to encourage that trend. Because there is one dominant platform, there is les
Giant load of crap.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that carriers want to develop features they can charge for on a recurring revenue (pay-per-use) basis. In a multiple OS, high flexibility world, features exist on the handset, not on the network. That means the customer gets to use music, video, voice dialing, games, photos, VNC, SSH, instant messaging, e-mail, etc, and it all looks like data to the network, or doesn't even use the network. This stops them from charging you per message/photo/song/minute of video, because messages become tiny bits of inexpensive data, photos get transferred to the user's PC via a memory card reader or data cable instead of through the high priced photo service (or as a message that is indistinguishable from a tiny amount of data), etc...
Developers don't write for mobile platforms because they aren't welcome there, not because there are too many OSs. When the carriers say that the number of OSs limits new applications, what they really mean is that it limits their ability to lock down applications as a service.
Re: (Score:2)
I disagree completely. Ignoring the question of whether the 'one OS is simpler to develop for' argument was ever true, it certainly isn't anymore. Develop once in a cross-platform tool - say, Java or Python, using GTK+ or Qt - and basically you can run anywhere. Yes, yes, you do need to test on lots of platforms, and yes, there will be problems. But then there are also problems running Windows 2000
Thank god (Score:3, Interesting)
Java is huge in the mobile market as a result.
The problem I have is all the oses are dictated by the monopolies of the carriers. Even the menu's must work all the same and all applications except java applets need to be signed so they can be the gatekeepers aka the carriers.
No, NOT thank god. (Score:2)
Java on mobile devices sucks. I have a Treo 700p and Opera Mini for it just doesn't work as well as a native app would. It friggin asks me everytime I start to use it do I want to connect to the internet. No I opened up a web browser so I could NOT connect to the internet. WTF?
The Apple approach (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Apple denies SDKs to the iPhone for its own, selfish reasons but you can be sure that Cingular is not excluded from the process. Cingular isn't simply going to "let" Apple make the decisions you suggest. You think it's Apple that doesn't want a VoIP app on its device?
Mobile developers cry it too (well, "fewer") (Score:5, Informative)
- Symbian UIQ
- Symbian Series 60
- Symbian Series 60 v2.0
- Symbian Series 60 v2.2
- Symbian Series 60 v3.0
- Symbian Series 80
- Symbian Series 80 v2
- BREW 2.10
- BREW 3.12
- BREW 3.14
- Palm 5.4
- Palm 6
- WinCE 4 SP 2003
- WinCE 5 SP
- WinCE 5 PPC
- J2ME CLDC
- J2ME CDC
- J2ME JSR-184
- J2ME M3G
And that's just the ones that I can remember off the top of my head. Some of these are legacy builds, but there are still customers who want them. A large part of our product family is platform abstraction code; if you want to support multiple mobile platforms, you either bloat your code with abstractions, or drown it in #ifdefs. In either case, you have to write to the lowest common denominator, and avoid anything that's even remotely platform dependent, which does engender decent coding discipline but at the result of reducing productivity. That's mostly a C issue, but even J2ME isn't immune, particularly when you have to deal with extensions like OpenGL ES or M3G.If I never had to work in anything but (e.g.) J2MD CDC OpenGL ES or (gasps of outrage!) WinCE SP2005 again, I'd be a very happy bunny indeed.
Re: (Score:2)
That thing you call "bloat" some call good coding practices. And it's not like it will bloat your binary if you code it correctly, which is all that really matters.
Re: (Score:2)
Palm OS Cobalt was stillborn and buried quite a while ago now. Unless you're talking about whatever Access' forthcoming offering is called?
Re: (Score:2)
Nope, S60 3.x is binary and source incompatible with older S60 versions. UIQ is a totally different UI layer and requires that all UI-related parts of your code be more or less totally rewritten. UIQ 3.x is also binary and source incompatible with older UIQ versions - it's likely not included on the g
Re: (Score:2)
Mobile Users Cry, "Less Phone Executives" (Score:4, Funny)
Easy Fix (Score:4, Insightful)
Open access, open API's, competition in the phone market, competition in the rate plan market.
This appears to be the sweet spot for government regulation in this market because it increases competition, not decreases it.
I imagine it also drives towards Internet-based services as a means to avoid redundant negotiations with multiple carriers for every new feature a phone manufacturer wants to implement.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Arguably, the rest of the world has more land size/population than the US. So your argument fails right there. Then again, I've never had any trouble using my GSM phone when I've travelled to USA. On the other hand, I don't know what all these other TLAs you write about mean either.
Its the file format, stupid (Score:2)
This is Pure Bullshit (Score:2)
They complain about all the phones because they have to configure them all. Well, this is a bunch of horseshit. The manufacturer will be happy to do that for you, aside maybe from loading in custom graphics. And it's unimportant anyway, because you can't even take the config from a RAZR V3 and dump it to a RAZR V3i for instance. Many settings are the same, but many settings are NOT the same (the speaker/mic gain table is not the same, for example) so you actually have to roll a whole new config file not jus
Re: (Score:2)
However: I do think that non-smartphones will see a common Linux variant as their base in the future, with J2ME on top. I just don't th
Re:Answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps. But despite what the article claims, the problem is not a proliferation of operating systems. The problem is a proliferation of userland APIs. If the phone presents a consistent API to userland programs, then the underlying OS is irrelevant. To an extent, the mobile world has a standard API in the form of J2ME. But it's far from universal, and support is patchy, so an app written for one phone may or may not work on another phone. And of course, J2ME isn't necessarily the best choice of API in the first place. But your single OS solution could still potentially suffer from the problem of multiple APIs, so that in itself isn't a complete solution. I'll admit that it would probably help the situation, though, and agree with you that it's unlikely to happen.
Re: (Score:2)
No matter what you choose your APIs will multiply like rabbits. Because people want something better, something that was not thought about during development of previous revision/version/variant of API, something that cause a giant in-fight leading to exclusion from current standard etc.
While it would be lovely to have one standard platform I doubt industry would agree to restrictions that come with it. You h
Re: (Score:2)
Right. The root of the problem is a lack of standardization. Each company wants it's own proprietary interfaces to everything, and that practice made them some extra money in the short term. Now they're whining because customers are expecting more and they have no standards upon which to build.
Take any major engineering achievement and you will see lots of open standards beneath it. The carriers want the lock-in without the inherent engineering limitations; bi
Re:Answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Here the cellphone operators are telling you that this is a bad thing, and, ironically, you're by and large agreeing with them... Why not tell them that every vendor should pick their own linux distro that they can customize and install and be unique? Afterall, it's EXACTLY what you'd all do if the platform in this article were PC's instead of mobile phones...
-AC
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I don't. In my perfect word there would be one or two core OS, and they would be OPEN SOURCE. So, there is nothing ironic about my viewpoint.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Phone *providers* I can understand, because they need to have standards for things like image exchange.
Re: (Score:2)
"Inside Symbian: the Platform Nokia Secretly Hates"
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/
I used to work for a company (Extended Systems, now iAnywhere) that developed on Symbian. It's a horrible development platform from what I was told.
OpenMoko fanboi (Score:2)
Do *you* want control over your phone the same way you have control over your desktop (assuming you run Linux)? Check out OpenMoko [openmoko.org], and the FIC Neo 1973. It's essentially a palm-top computer that also happens to be a GPS-enabled phone, all running Free software.
The iPhone will restrict software just as much as current offerings do.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, no one is forcing these providers to support all phones nor is it the case that any of them do it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)