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Tag: os

  • Keyboard and Touchscreen For Palm's New Handset


    Details are emerging about Palm’s expected launch of its latest smartphone and operating system at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show.

    The new handset is to have a full QWERTY keyboard that will slide down under a portrait-oriented touchscreen.

    This, and the new Nova operating system, are to be launched Thursday, according to CrunchGear.

    Faced with mounting losses and weak smartphone sales, the success of the new phone and Linux-based operating system could very well decide the company’s fate.

    It should be clearer by the end of the week whether Palm’s offerings will enable it to succeed with its plan to position itself somewhere between RIM’s BlackBerry and Apple’s iPhone.

  • Palm Gets $100m Lifeline Ahead Of Nova Launch


    Palm has secured a USD $100 million equity lifeline from Elevation Partners just a few weeks before it unveils its new Nova operating system.

    Faced with mounting losses and weak smartphone sales, the success of the new operating system could very well decide the company’s fate.

    The equity investment by Elevation Partners, which already holds a large stake in the handset maker, will help underwrite the cost of launching Nova and the first line of products to run on it.

    Palm has revealed little about the new operating system but reports suggest it will be pitched between RIM’s enterprise-oriented Blackberrys and Apple’s more multi-media iPhones.

    Palm just posted a loss of USD $506 million in its fiscal second quarter and saw both its revenues and the number of smartphones sold drop.

    Earlier this month, Palm announced that Douglas C. Jeffries had been appointed as the company’s Chief Financial Officer.

    Previously chief accounting officer at eBay, Jeffries will join Palm in January as replacement for Andy Brown.

    Roger McNamee, co-founder of Elevation Partners, which also counts rock star Bono among its investment team, was in no doubt about the potential for Palm.

    "We believe that Palm is in a position to transform the cell phone industry, and we are pleased to have the opportunity to make this additional investment in the company," he said.

    There are many who seriously doubt that.

  • OnePhone Seeks To Benefit From Shift To Open-source

    smartphone.biz-news spoke to Christoph Wernli, business development manager at Devoteam, about the convergence market and the opportunities offered by open-source operating systems.

    Devoteam is to release a Blackberry version of its VoIP client OnePhone that runs on mobile platforms enabling voice calls over an IP network.

    It is expected to be available for the RIM handset in the first quarter of 2009.

    The application, which effectively turns mobile devices into extensions of employees’ desk phones, is also being made ready for Android and the iPhone.

    Christoph Wernli, business development manager at Devoteam, said the application would have to be modified to comply with Apple’s legal requirements for services such as VoIP functionality.

    That aside, he said the aim was to expand beyond the current offering for Symbian and Windows Mobile handset to provide its clients – and in particular operators – with a wider choice of devices on which OnePhone can be used.

    "What we are aiming to do is create this same kind of convergence platform for all operating systems out there," he said.

    Convergence Is The Future

    OnePhone is a SIP-based, dual mode GSM-WiFi solution that is able to interwork with public and private WiFi hot spots, and with mobile networks.

    It was first released in 2004 – before the advent of smartphones – in an internal Bluetooth version.

    Wernli said they had anticipated the growth of WiFi and sophisticated handsets, and the application had evolved for use with 3G and WiFi.

    "The vision we had is that it’s not going to be a mobile world but a converged one," he said.

    From an infrastructure access point of view, this entails a plethora of wireless options – WiFi or GSM/GPRS/UMTS.

    Wernli said this meant that a device has to be agnostic in regards to the access methods it uses.

    Devoteam had also to consider the gamut of services required for mobile devices, including:

    • Traditional voice
    • Messaging – SMS, email, instant messaging
    • Location Based Services (LBS)
    • TV
    • Video calls

    "All these should be accessible seamlessly by whatever means is available, without having to choose different WiFi access points or UMTS, if you are in the field. That should be transparent," said Wernli.

    He said OnePhone has been set up based on these requirements. As a result, it sits on top of the different stacks for accessing GSM or WiFi but beneath the user interface.

    "That means that on one hand the OnePhone is not necessarily visible to the user, but can translate any kind of user action towards different access stacks," he said.

    "So, if you place a voice call, then of course you couldn’t care less if you are in the office or in range of WiFi access or outside on GSM.

    "You place the call, OnePhone intercepts it and depending on the parameters, processes the call over GSM or, if WiFi is available, it will transform this user action into a VoIP call."

    Wernli said that ability to seamlessly communicate via the best possible wireless option at any given moment was one of the fundamental concepts of OnePhone.

    He said it was this that gave it a huge advantage over other applications that were often separate add-ons that sat on top of the user interface.

    "OnePhone is structured so that it can be used by my grandmother – it’s point and click," he said.

    Convergence Platform

    Wernli explained that behind the scenes OnePhone was a convergence platform providing voice call functions as well as others such as video calling and access to data (email, mapping etc).

    A key element was its ability to provide call continuity, switching between GSM and WiFi mid-call without calls being dropped or any loss of call quality.

    He said other solutions relied on special boxes to provide this functionality, increasing the burden on enterprises.

    "OnePhone implements the hand-over mechanism, which is entirely client-based," he said.

    "It senses when it is losing the WiFi signal and starts transferring a call over to GSM or whatever is available."

    Signal strength is continuously measured and based on a series of complex factors the application decides when it is necessary to start the hand-over procedure.

    "It’s a trade-off. On the one hand you want to remain on VoIP as long as possible because it costs less," he said.

    "On the other hand you don’t want to have dropped calls."

    Encryption Becoming Essential

    A recent feature added to OnePhone was the ability to encrypt voice calls, something that is required particularly by users handling sensitive information such as banks.

    Wernli said there was still a certain wariness that someone could eavesdrop on calls.

    "With GSM it’s usually taken for granted that no-one can drop in on your call," he said.

    "With VoIP that’s not the impression people have."

    Wernli said because Devoteam developed and controls the entire stack within the application it has the flexibilty to implement such user requests speedily – something he said was almost certainly not always the case.

    "We don’t have to tell the customer that we would like to provide this feature, but you will have to wait until someone in Microsoft or Nokia agrees," he said.

    Market Expanding

    Devoteam’s main market is currently Italy, where it has over 60,000 users but it signed up a UK operator earlier this year and is currently in talks with operators in Spain and France.

    Typically sales are to operators who are able to sell OnePhone’s mobility function as a complementary product to an IP PBX.

    Wernli said that while efforts were being focussed on the European market, they weren’t ruling out future operations in the US.

    "We have seen a lot of interest in the upper segment of the market where OnePhone is used to offer additional services to complement other corporate functions and broaden an enterprise’s offering."

    Open-source World

    Wernli said he expected the penetration of OnePhone to increase as the shift towards handsets being mobile computers rather than simple phones quickened.

    He said that in addition to improvements in hardware towards iPhone-like handsets, the shift to open-source operating systems such as Android, LiMo and iPhone was extremely positive.

    "Open-source gives so much more choice to enable new kinds of services," he said."We will see a huge explosion of applications and services in the same way we saw it on the Internet 10 years ago."

  • Linux Successfully Ported To iPhone


    The open-source OS Linux has been ported to the iPhone and iPod for the first time.

    A member of the iPhone Dev Team – going by the screen name Planetbeing – has managed to load Linux 2.6’s kernel to the 2G and 3G iPhone, as well as the first generation iPod Touch.

    Although many drivers are missing, this first attempt offers support for the framebuffer driver, serial driver, and serial over USB driver.

    Certainly enough to announce that the iPhone is running an alternative OS.

    The dev team is still working on issues such as enabling write support for the NAND, Wireless networking, Touchscreen support, Sound, Accelerometer and Baseband support.

    It would appear there’s still much to be done, but it’s a big step forward for those desperate to have the iPhone able to boot an alternative OS such as Android.

  • Forget Megapixels – Most Camera Phones Not Up To The Job


    When it comes to cameras – and that includes camera phones – many consumers are fixated by the megapixel count.

    Yet John Turner, product manager for multi-media at Symbian, said higher resolution was definitely no guarantee of quality.

    He said this was especially true since the majority of camera phone photos are taken in the darkened environs of bars and nightclubs.

    "There is a four to six megapixel sweet spot for camera phones," he said. "But customers have in their minds the idea that resolution equals quality, so they are always going to want more resolution.

    "The majority of pictures are taken in a pub or nightclub but only a quarter of all phones have in-built flash.

    "So camera phones are not catering for that primary use. That will change over the year to come and improve things a great deal."

    Camera Phone Sales Outstrip Cameras‘

    Camera phones have increased so rapidly in popularity since the first snap-on versions were introduced in Japan in 1999 that they now threaten the market for traditional digital cameras.

    So much so, that by 2009, more camera phones will have shipped cumulatively than "normal" cameras have shipped in the entire history of photography.

    Turner said the camera fitted well with the trend towards a convergence of digital devices, allowing it to be integrated with the cell phone, Internet and GPS.

    He said this was to the consumers’ benefit – with just one device to carry and charge, while allowing users to connect with social networking sites, tag photos with locations and so on.

    But this has also created a few challenges, according to Turner, because consumers now expect camera phones to function as well as cameras.

    So it’s now taken for granted that "standard" features, such as higher resolution, better storage performance, better battery life, smile detection and image editing, will also be on the camera phone.

    Megapixel Fixation

    The fact that consumers regard megapixels as a headline indicator of performance is something that retailers and manufacturers haven’t been quick to discourage.

    Indeed the megapixels count continues to climb rapidly, with 12 mpx expected to be offered on some handsets next year and 16 mpx the year after – putting them firmly in amongst the mid-range digital camera market.

    Ericsson AB of Sweden recently announced that through technologies such as “HSPA Evolution” and” LTE” (long term evolution), by the year 2012, they would develop mobile phones with cameras from 12-20 megapixel and Full HD video shooting capabilities.

    The future might also bring an XGA resolution display (1024×768 pixels) with a digital camera and new camcorder technologies to mobile phones.

    Turner said this striving for greater resolution didn’t necessarily translate into better photos, since issues such as shutter lag were making a "hard problem even harder".

    He said Symbian was working closely with partners such as Scalado to address these challenges.

    Symbian is also spending money on improving multi-media in general and making it easier for its partners to introduce new features, such as accelerometers and HD multi-media processing.

    Turner said this would be seen in big changes that were going to be made to the operating system by the end of the first half of 2009.

    So no more blurry, out-of-shot party pics then. What camera phones features do you regard as the most essential for developers to concentrate on?

  • Symbian Vows To Sweep Clear Obstacles For Developers


    Symbian’s CEO Nigel Clifford spelt out his vision for the organisation’s future under Nokia as one which would sweep away previous obstacles and attract innovative developers.

    Giving the opening keynote speech at the Smartphone Show in London, Clifford admitted that up until now developers may have been put off working with Symbian because of licensing agreements and conditions.

    He promised that would be among the “double quick” changes that would be made when the deal by Nokia to purchase Symbian goes through next year.

    “We will take a popular operating system and user interfaces and create a new platform with a new identity,” he said.

    This would solve the conundrum that, according to Clifford, people had been faced with:  " We have so far lived in an either/or world where you can either have free code but with a small footprint – or you can have very capable, proven software but at a cost.

    “With Symbian we are moving from that to both ‘and’ – proven in the market place and for free.”

    Sporting a broken arm from a cycling accident, Clifford said the result of this would be that there would no longer need to be a trade-off in developers’ minds.

    He said the cost and effort would be taken out of the development track and a unified asset created.

    “We are sweeping the hurdles away so we can get on with the job at hand,” he said.

    Earlier, David Wood, executive vice president of research at Symbian, also stressed where the organisation’s emphasis would lie once the deal with Nokia was completed.

    “There are three words that are most important for the success of the Symbian platform going forward: developers, developers and developers,” he said.