Watch Out for Linux on Your Mobile Phones
August 23, 2009 by Clair Ching
Filed under The Free World.
There were some models of mobile phones that had Linux on them. It was how many years ago when Motorola released some, and I think it was also possible to have Ubuntu on Palm mobile phones, if I recall correctly. Anyhow, these past few days had something to say about Linux and mobile phone manufacturers such as Nokia and Samsung, aside from Palm, RIM and HTC. And also something about the dwindling marketshare of Microsoft’s smartphones.
Mobile phones have practically become part of our lives. And Linux is emerging as an OS to be used on the smartphones. Image credit: Morguefile, user: taliesin
There’s a review of Nokia’s N900. From the looks of things, Nokia will be using Maemo rather than Symbian on its smartphone offerings in the future. With Symbian they are too limited and with Maemo, they hope to attract even more developers. With what they gave as screenshots of the phone and its applications, it looks user friendly enough for me to get interested in it. In terms of the design of the phone’s interface, the icons look clear enough and big enough.
Samsung seems to be following Nokia when it comes to making a Linux that fits its smartphones. It will combine Linux will its TouchWiz technology. Unwired View points out other information that might be important when it comes to the development of an operating system for Samsung phones.
For me, what’s exciting is that there are advantages in the Maemo-powered Nokia N900:
- Faster boot time. This is what’s apparent in the protoype.
- It has a stable browser. It also has support for Flash, video and applets.
- It’s easier to switch languages in it compared to the Symbian-powered Nokia phones.
If the Nokia N900 is like this, it brings me to wonder what the Samsung phones will look like with Touch Wiz and its OS. I think that there will be users that won’t even care what OS is on their phones but for those who do care, this is great news.
Are there other mobile phones that you are excited about because of Linux? What are they? Care to share them here?
