The Motorola gambit

Motorola has long built feature phones and basic cell phones on the Linux platform. But it is having success with Linux on smart phones, reportedly selling 1 million of its Linux-based Ming smart phones per quarter in China. Overall, Motorola has released nine Linux-based phones in recent years. The best-known is the ROKR E2, which has a built-in MP3 player and SecureDisk storage, according to a company spokesperson.

Even though Motorola was once a co-owner of Symbian and has also created phones based on that system, the company understood the value of mobile Linux long ago, according to an executive.

"In August of 2001, we had our first kickoff meeting to look at Linux on phones," said Mark VandenBrink, chief architect for Motorola's systems software and mobile device business. "We shipped our first Linux handset in 2003."

He noted that one reason for that early interest was that Linux is indeed a less expensive platform.

"We found that all chip set manufacturers were using Linux to test chips and to do functionality and coverage tests," VandenBrink said. "So when we started talking with our chip set manufacturers, they were already doing it, and we found their source code was already available. The same was true when we moved ahead to the next level of functionality like audio and video codecs at the application level -- everybody was already using Linux. So when we looked at pulling everything together, a lot of the pieces were already available.

"Finally, there is a huge ecosystem of people all around the world doing all sorts of fascinating things with Linux," VandenBrink said. "In little universities, little mom-and-pop shops and big companies, people around the world are using Linux for innovations."

Motorola has long since sold its stake in Symbian and, earlier this year, stepped up its commitment to mobile Linux. It announced a partnership with several major players in the wireless space including NEC, Panasonic Corporation of North America, Samsung and cellular carriers NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone Group PLC to develop common application programming interfaces (API) for mobile Linux. That is essential to the success of Linux as a mobile platform, many observers agree.

"The problem with Linux has been that it doesn't have any one owner," said Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner. "What you need are specific profiles that define the target device. Microsoft has that with smart phones and Pocket PCs. Developers can develop [applications] and be sure they'll work. Symbian has it, too. But since Linux developers have been so focused on open source, they haven't created these profiles."

These profiles will enable applications developed for mobile Linux to run on phones from multiple vendors, which it can't do currently. The operating system's current lack of cross-vendor support is one reason it has been relegated largely to relatively unsophisticated devices, the analysts agreed.

If the Motorola-led effort succeeds, it could mean wider acceptance of mobile Linux for advanced devices like smart phones, the analysts said. However, the effort has a long way to go, Dulaney noted.

"I don't see it going anywhere," he said. "Every time somebody tries this, a vendor says, 'If you do it my way, we'll do it.'"

VandenBrink disagreed that the effort would fail, although he acknowledged that the Motorola-led effort will take time.