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Google makes Chrome OS open source
Google made the early code available to the open source community and claims external developers will have the same access to the code as internal Google developers.... Continued »
Category: Linux Handheld
November 17th, 2009
Five ways Android could get into trouble
On the surface these are happy days in Android-land.
Going into the key Christmas selling season, Android is eating Windows for lunch. New (non-Google) development centers are continuing to open, new manufacturers are coming on stream.
What could possibly go wrong?
Knowing that rising markets need a wall of worry to keep going up, here are some possibilities:
- Momentum must be maintained. Once you start gobbling market share you have to keep doing it. Even a slowing of momentum can be read as failure.
- Developers must be kept happy. Some are complaining they’re working full-time getting apps written for the Android operating system running on multiple phones.
- The Android app store has some catching-up to do, especially in the user experience area.
- When will Android get a “killer app” that the iPhone can’t match, or one it hasn’t already matched?
- Can Google ride herd on its complex ecosystem? Everyone knows who the boss is with the iPhone. Not so with Android. (UPDATE: Rich Sands writes to say this article from his site is more to the point.)
We shouldn’t get too excited about Android’s early success. A 3.5% market share is still a gnat on Apple’s elephant. Early buzz does not make for victory — as President Howard Dean will tell you. (Or President Huckabee, if you prefer.)
Google has set itself a more complex task than that which faced Apple when it introduced the iPhone a few years ago. Google is using an open source approach, which means there are more hands on the steering wheel. And Google is trying to overcome an established leader, leading to charges of me-tooism.
A good start is not the race.
November 12th, 2009
Broadcom goes open source and hell freezes over
When the rock group Eagles broke up in 1980 they said they would get back together “when hell froze over.” They did get back together, in 1994. The album was called Hell Freezes Over.
Point is you can promise you will never do something — never, ever, ever — but business is business.
It’s with this in mind we find Broadcom making its BroadVoice voice codecs open source and royalty free under GPL V. 2.
GigaOM is wondering whether Broadcom isn’t just pushing for higher priced, higher quality voice from service providers using the codecs. I have another theory.
Broadcom saw its greatest success in pioneering relationships with Taiwanese OEMs. When other chip companies were offering these firms software and ecosystems, Broadcom offered them solutions, complete designs from brand names they could bang out for a quick profit.
What I saw at CompuTex this year was an enormous interest from these OEMs, whose ties to Chinese manufacturing are incredibly strong, to go “up the stack” of value, to own their own designs and create their own brand names.
They see this as an impossible dream on the desktop, but very possible in the handset business, a Broadcom niche. Systems like Android, LiMo and Symbian are open source, so the components going into them should also be open source. It’s the most effective way to compete with Apple.
In taking this route, the OEMs are explicitly rejecting Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and this is a very big deal. This has nothing to do with the sales world they desire. They gave Microsoft all of the Netbook market and stuck Linux in a corner.
This Broadcom announcement is the best proof yet that the future of the handheld market is Linux.
November 4th, 2009
LiMo has a second phone
The LiMo Foundation has delivered its second mobile phone to the market under the second release of its software.
The Vodafone 360 Samsung M1 looks uncomfortably like an iPhone, only with three buttons below the screen. The name is a hybrid — Vodafone 360 refers to the carrier’s service platform, Samsung M1 the phone manufacturer.
And it’s the Vodafone 360 that is at the heart of it all. The company calls this its “web services strategy.” Vodafone owns 45% of Verizon Wireless of the U.S.
Version 2.0 of the LiMo platform was announced in September alongside another Samsung phone, the H1. While Android stories revolve around developers and phone makers, LiMo seems proudest of its agreements with carriers.
The M1 itself seems to be a dumbed-down version of the H1, with less memory, a smaller screen, and presumably a lower price. It seems the idea is to hit the low-end of the market with something that looks like an iPhone, but isn’t, and a network that seems like the Internet, but isn’t.
LiMo press announcements also tend to carry a breathless quality that hasn’t been seen in America since the 1980s, except among recent college graduates. Here’s a taste:
This latest handset developed by Samsung offers mobile consumers a unique mobile experience presented through Vodafone’s stunning feature-rich, highly customizable Vodafone 360 user interface (UI) – providing a new set of Internet services for the mobile and PC that gathers all of a customer’s friends, communities, entertainment and personal favorites in one place.
You would think these people invented the handset.
Snark aside we are starting to see the dimensions of contrasting strategies among the various Linux handset groups. Android is about the makers, LiMo the carriers, and Moblin the developers.
Which will win the customers?
October 29th, 2009
Qualcomm joins open source movement at head of parade
Qualcomm, which has long had a major position in mobile chip sets and standards, has joined the open source movement with an eye to leading it. (Picture from Whenpigsfly.info.)
The company formed a new unit called Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC), under a senior vice president, and it joined the board of directors of the Symbian Foundation.
The idea behind the QuIC is to push open source, including systems like Chrome, Webkit and Android as well as Symbian, the company said.
Qualcomm is doing this to support its Snapdragon chip set, a CPU and graphics chip package designed for low power and handheld devices, most based on Linux. These include what Qualcomm calls “smartbooks,” netbook-phone hybrids on which Chinese manufacturers like Acer, Asus and HTC are already working.
The move should also be seen in light of recent moves by Intel to support mobile open source. Matt Asay writes that “pigs are beginning to fly” and he’s right.
But where are they heading?
The efforts of Qualcomm surrounding Snapdragon seem to prove that the “waiting for Godot” story of “desktop Linux” may finally get an appearance by its title character appearing on the stage in the form of a telephone-laptop hybrid.
But open source advocates should also take a jaundiced view of this, not just because it has been delayed for years. As Matt notes, combining open source and proprietary technology in the way Qualcomm wants to do, while legitimate, does threaten to maintain the vendor lock-in that open source is meant to fight.
Just because you draw a picture does not mean the pig is really flying.
October 26th, 2009
Why Android is beating Windows Mobile
Most analysts have it wrong. It’s not about a balance of power and it’s not about Google becoming what Sun promised to be and it’s certainly not about that dread word free.
It’s about the game that the two companies are playing. Google is playing, and Microsoft is not. (Here, one of the 16 “masterpieces” in the dogs playing poker series, from Wikipedia.)
With Google Android you see where all your competitors start from. You can innovate from there. You can differentiate your phone from other Android phones.
With Microsoft there is less wiggle room. The only people who see the code are Microsoft and (maybe) the manufacturer. You are betting that Microsoft can out-innovate Apple. (Stop laughing.)
No one in the mobile business throught Apple could out-innovate Apple back in the day. Remember when Apple was playing footsie with Motorola? No one in the mobile business thought Apple had what it took to be a “lead dog” — they all wanted it in harness with an unchanging view.
So Apple did its own phone, its own way, and Apple won.
Microsoft lacks the courage to do this. It won’t compete with its own ecosystem. It doesn’t understand that hardware is software. So it plays the game the way Symbian did five years ago, even though Symbian has abandoned that game, so there is no reason to fear Microsoft, and no “there” there.
The days of control are over, unless you’re willing to bet big. Apple did, and wound up playing Monopoly on its own design. What’s Microsoft playing, Blind Man’s Bluff?
By contrast, think of Google as dealing hands of poker.
All the players at the Android table can see one anothers’ cards. Not all the cards, but enough to get a feel for what’s happening. They can keep their aces in the hole, they can innovate or compete in some other way.
The dealer is patient, you can play all day, and guess who ends up with most of the chips at the end of play?
The dealer.
Google is betting that carriers and manufacturers will play enough hands with it that it can gain some market share. Right now that looks like a pretty good bet.
Microsoft is like a gambler with a fistful of dollars that can’t find the game.
October 19th, 2009
Motorola goes all-in for Google Android
What makes the World Series of Poker compelling is that it ends.
TV poker has specified stakes and players going “all-in.”
Business lacks such climaxes. You seldom see such a grand gesture. There’s always another quarter. It’s a grind.
That’s what makes Motorola’s gamble on the Google Android, and the grand gesture of its “Droid” launch, worth a second look. The company is going “all-in.” There is no backup plan. If the sales parachute does not open the company falls like a rock.
Failure might be embarrassing for Google, but it has other partners and many other opportunities. For Motorola this is do or die.
Even if the company itself doesn’t go under with a Droid failure, this is its last shot at cellphone glory. Its phone sales have been cut in half the last few years, its market share is a shadow of its former glory, and the vultures are circling.
Having followed Motorola off-and-on for over 30 years I find this a fascinating spectacle. The company has been around for over 80 years, producing its first cellphone back in 1973. Motorola’s corporate history claims it invented Six Sigma, and among its acquisitions over the years were General Instrument and Symbol Technologies.
Now Motorola is betting on Google to help make it a player in radios again, its original niche. The first pictures of the platform are out, and were enough to send the stock soaring. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
How do you think it will taste?
October 15th, 2009
Should Google spin Android into a foundation?
How does it maintain control of Android and at the same time build a community of interests in which developers can seek profit?
The easy answer is to turn the Open Handset Alliance into the Android Foundation. (Fans of the late Isaac Asimov will recognize this fellow even in French.)
Critics love to claim that Eclipse is just an IBM front, but that’s a cheap shot, based on the fact that IBM gains huge benefits from Eclipse without having to pay all the bills there.
Foundations can be a great way to organize vendors who have a common purpose but divergent business plans. The Linux Foundation is a good example of this.
But there are risks in an Android Foundation, as Symbian’s David Wood said when they were going open source a year ago.
Forks are one.
Foundations lead naturally to forks. Every vendor who sells an “enhanced” version of Eclipse tools is pushing a proprietary fork. There are dozens of Linux distros, each of which forks the code in some way to provide added value.
How much Android forking can Google stand before the value starts dribbling through its fingers? Like to see some stuck-up Microsoft search engine sitting on an Android phone? (Make your blood boil? Well I should say.)
There is, of course, another risk in going the Foundation route. It doesn’t always work. Witness LiMo, which Motorola recently abandoned for Android. Witness Moblin, which Intel gave to the Linux Foundation. Witness Symbian itself for that matter.
The difference between the OHA and a conventional software foundation is that for Android to move forward it must first be expressed in phones, in hardware. The chicken-and-egg question here yields an easy answer. It’s the chicken. An egg, the software, is pretty meaningless if it’s just sitting on a server.
This fact reduces the threat of a fork. The value of any Android handset lies in its compatibility. Without that it might as well be a Windows Mobile set.
So long as Google is the biggest investor in Android, then, it’s probably doing the right thing by avoiding the foundation model. But at some point the rest of the ecosystem needs to grow up for Google to get its investment back.
So if Google does set up an Android Foundation some time down the road, know that it’s a sign of success, and that it no longer has to push this rock up the hill all by itself.
October 12th, 2009
Why the big Android bandwagon?
We have had open source mobile platforms for years. Why has Android become a bandwagon, one big enough that people are wondering if it’s not growing too big for its britches.
One word: marketing.
Thanks to its low-cost structure, Google can subsidize the marketing of its products to a degree even experienced rivals can’t match. As I have said before there is a price lower than free, and Google is uniquely positioned to pay that price.
Why? Look at the ad above, for the HTC myTouch, from Vimeo. All those celebrities aren’t just selling T-Mobile, or HTC. They are also selling Google. Android gave Google an excuse to do TV ads, with others’ help. Even if it doesn’t sell phones it sells the Google brand, and Google benefits from that.
It’s all about the sharing. By spreading the development effort through open source, Google also spreads the marketing cost as various players vie for position. But Google’s size and budget are what make this a good deal for everyone else.
Symbian and RIM can’t pay this price to the degree Google can. Symbian was spun-out to become self-sustaining, and its developer outreach efforts may be all it can do. RIM has a proprietary background, and proprietary profits, so for it to grab open source may easily be seen as desperation.
Google has both the money and the reputation to push product through the channel that has its roots in open source. Its multiplicity of developers means all of them have an incentive to drive down the open source incline and the open source development incline.
Google may eventually seek to monetize all this with online services, but it is developing the market before showing its hand in that area. Meanwhile, the ad revenue from having Web pages appear on more mobile kit is all it really needs. (Yes, this means the iPhone is subsidizing Android.)
Google’s cost structure gives it the power to be patient, something no other market player has. The Android bandwagon is built on this patience.
To succeed, however, it will have to deliver products as good or better than the iPhone, at the same or less cost, with just as many apps. That risk to its reputation is all Google is laying on the line here, but since failure will also hurt open source that risk is also shared.
October 8th, 2009
Google plays a hand of Ogre with Apple
Those of a certain age will remember an early Steve Jackson game called Ogre. It was a two-player game where one player had a single piece, a powerful piece called the Ogre. The other player had everything else.
This pretty much sums up Google’s Android strategy against the Apple iPhone. Apple in this case plays the Ogre. (Picture from Steve Jackson Games.)
The combination of Apple’s proprietary iPhone design and its exclusive deal with AT&T has proven financially powerful. Apple created a market no one thought existed for a data-driven mobile Internet client and everyone else is playing catch-up.
With Dell now agreeing to supply AT&T with its version of the Android, Google now has game pieces on all four major U.S. carriers, including the one Apple plays on. T-Mobile was the first carrier to carry Android kit, Verizon is being promised a bunch of it. Sprint and Samsung will be in on the game in a Moment.
Everybody gets to play the way they want. Carriers can get exclusives on designs, and negotiate any deal on the resulting data flow they wish. Both new and old manufacturers get to play in the phone game and try to innovate on the margins.
All this work feeds back into the Android ecosystem, and all content sales feed into the Android marketplace. Google just wants a place to advertise alongside the content.
It’s a fun game, whose knock-on effects are a direct challenge to Microsoft, Symbian, and the Blackberry folks. Google seems destined to be the market’s #2 player by early next year, #2 with a bullet.
But please note this. All Google’s pieces taken together don’t yet add up to the power of Apple’s iPhone. The Ogre still has the power. But Google has the dice.
October 6th, 2009
How Verizon might ruin Android
Verizon makes Apple look open.
But they are one-half the U.S. mobile phone duopoly (T-Mobile and Sprint are minor players) so the kids at the Googleplex are doubtless celebrating news that Verizon will be working on bringing Android phones to market.
Verizon has a ton of incentive to make this work. Apple’s iPhone is the 800-pound gorilla in the wireless room, and since it’s exclusive to AT&T Verizon has been hemorrhaging market share (especially on the high end) for many months now.
Both sides were saying the right things today, but Verizon Wireless has based its corporate identity on maintaining control of its wireless environment.
Old habits will be hard to break.
Top management at Verizon seems to have decided that in its pursuit of market share it will throw everything it can at the wall and hope something sticks.
But what if Verizon succeeds? What if it starts selling a lot of Android kit, and those users start making heavy use of apps for which Verizon isn’t getting its usual cut?
What happens when those in Verizon middle management, raised on the iron belief that Verizon must get a cut of every bit on its wireless network, see Google spreading its open source gospel on its network?
I think I know. And I don’t like it.
It will take more than a few words at a press conference to remove my suspicions. How about you?
September 25th, 2009
Can Linux beat the bloat
Linus Torvalds shocked the crowd (well, the group) at LinuxCon this week with three words.
“Linux is bloated.” He added it’s even gotten “huge and scary.”
(This fat penguin, by Squiggums at DeviantArt, can likely be licensed by the Linux Foundation for a reasonable fee. Just change the fish in the thought bubble to a Microsoft Windows logo.)
Part of the problem here may be just how close Linus himself is to the project. He was there at the beginning, and here he is with something bigger than any conglomerate’s Unix ever got. The whole world depends on Linux — servers, clients, phones. That’s got to weigh on a person.
Or it could be nostalgia. I get this way some days driving around Atlanta. I remember when that mall was an empty lot, I see the store where that skyscraper now stands. I remember when the Peachtree Road Race course had just a half-dozen skyscrapers on it, before Elton John and Jane Fonda and the Olympics, back in the 20th century.
Imagine if Bill Gates managed the original Windows project 25 years ago and were still managing that architecture today, with every fix or improvement coming personally past his desk. I get tired just thinking about it.
On the other hand, maybe Linus is right. He’s the doctor. Maybe it’s impossible to build something that works on any machine, that works clean, that’s scrubbed regularly for bugs, that has enormous amounts of functionality, and doesn’t get bloated. A modular architecture can only get you so far.
Now it’s true that, as our Matt Asay notes, there’s Linux and then there’s Linux. The Linux that loads onto a Moblin phone bears little resemblance to, say, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. What they have in common is compatibility, a common way of looking at the world, so they can work seamlessly together.
As Linus’ personal blog notes, he does take vacations and has a good, happy family life. But has he thought of, like, a sabbatical? Take six months off and chill, do something else, travel, really get away from it for a while? This project is too big to depend on one man at the center — maybe that’s the problem.
So I want to hear from the real Linux geeks out there. Is Linux bloated? Are there things that can be done, from an architectural or development standpoint, to make it less bloated?
Linus sounds tired. Why don’t you be the boss for a while?
August 14th, 2009
Will mobile Linux distros hang separately?
HTC has had its Android phone out for months now, and there’s great excitement over the coming kit from Motorola.
Panasonic and NEC are out with new LiMo gear. Intel and Novell are both pushing the Moblin platform. Nokia is pushing Linux in the new Maemo phones.
But what are the chances you will be able to move software among these various phones? (Tux is holding a Treo in this picture from Palminfocenter.com.)
I am not a programmer. The job may be trivial. But until we know what is involved in doing the job the job cannot be done. And right now we don’t know what will be necessary.
The question for this weekend is, are these mobile Linux vendors making a big mistake by not collaborating more? Apple is still killing them, developer attention is not unlimited, Microsoft hearts developers, and Palm is still in the game.
Even taken together, the market share of all these Linux phones by the end of next year may be trivial next to what is being piled up by the competition. But these Linux phones can’t be taken together. They are all tied to different distributions. They all stand alone.
This is just what happened with Unix back in the day. The software was great, but each vendor had their own way of doing things, so the market never really developed. Unix did not hang together and so each vendor hung separately.
Is this about to happen with mobile Linux?
June 23rd, 2009
Intel-Nokia deal boosts open source
Whatever Nokia and Intel focus on it will be open source.
That’s the key takeaway from today’s announcement between the chipmaker and the mobile phone company to develop new devices to compete with the Apple iPhone, RIM Blackberry and Google Android.
Software development will be centered on two open source projects:
- Moblin, originally an Intel project but now run by the Linux Foundation.
- Maemo, a Nokia implementation created for an Internet tablet.
Delivery of gear will have to come fairly quickly, however, because Apple and its smartphone competitors are rapidly taking away market share from ordinary mobile phone producers like Nokia.
Basic to the concept are a touch screen, plenty of chip memory and an intuitive interface. Based on what I saw at CompuTex you can also expect to see waterproofing and (perhaps) support for WiMax, which Intel boosted heavily at the show.
Intel has been trying to gain share in the Taiwanese OEM market throughout this decade, and this year’s CompuTex was its best showing to date. But that was mainly in the area of laptops and netbooks, where it was aligned with Microsoft.
The Nokia alliance, combined with Far East manufacturing, give Intel a chance to innovate on a major player’s behalf and gain a place at the smartphone table.
But time is of the essence, because the market is ebbing away fast.
Question is, if you’re a developer, are you interested in helping them?
June 22nd, 2009
Channel ambition is not a conspiracy
Dietrich H. Schmitz Dietrich T. Schmitz has posted to Groklaw a piece quoting my CompuTex coverage and claiming a dark conspiracy.
I hate to disagree, especially with someone boasting such a fine German name as Dietrich H. Schmitz Dietrich T. Schmitz(next to which Dana Blankenhorn sounds almost Irish*), but what happened at CompuTex was no conspiracy. (Note: Cut and paste, Dana. Don’t copy names from memory.)
What happened at CompuTex was channel ambition.
MSI is trying to become a brand. Microsoft’s channel support can make or break those efforts. Chairman Joseph Hsu has bet the company on a strategy of eating into HP and Dell, and Microsoft would like nothing better than to help him punish those two companies for straying from the Microsoft way.
The question is whether that is a conspiracy or sharp business elbows.
Schmitz calls it a conspiracy. Many here were enthusiastic about the possibility of the ARM chip powering Android phones and Netbooks, and saw their hopes dashed at CompuTex.
But as I noted during that show, a company gets twice as much from a PC with their brand on it as one they make for someone else. MSI needs this money to survive in a world where its Chinese partners can undercut them. The margin justifies MSI’s existence.
It is also true that Linux cannot afford a presence in the channel. It’s not how we roll. You can’t invest in retailing if your product costs nothing. There is nothing to invest. That’s why Linux and open source depend on the Internet.
A monopolistic practice occurs when two sides are offering the same deal and one side gets all the business. But in this case both sides were not offering the same deal. Microsoft offered channel support, Linux a hearty handshake and rhetoric about freedom.
There was some indication at CompuTex that Taiwanese OEMs like the rhetoric, as evidenced by the answer Li Chang gave to my own question. Given the habit of reporters there not to ask questions, and executives there not to answer them, what Mr. Li offered was a soliloquy.
But here’s the deal. There’s more to the Taiwanese market than MSI, Asus and Acer. There are literally dozens of OEMs over there looking for a taste of channel success.
What Linux needs to succeed is a way to offer more than was offered MSI.
The question is, how would you structure a deal?
* Before you send me a nastygram on the name joke, the name Blankenhorn is German, but my mom is very Irish.
June 17th, 2009
Will Ubuntu remain a minor player
Click2try announced it is hosting a version of Ubuntu, and applications, which people can try free and rent if they like it.
It’s the most innovative thing I’ve seen from Ubuntu in months. And, yes, they didn’t even do it.
It is time for open source advocates to take off the rose-colored glasses and ask if Ubuntu — more appropriately its Canonical business arm headed by Mark Shuttleworth — is ever going to be a factor below the server level.
I have always assumed that Ubuntu was the desktop play, but it has been blown out in netbooks and seems to have no presence in phones.
Part of the problem is the channel because, as I have written here before, there is a price lower than free. Acquiring a retail presence costs money, and since a free operating system has none it’s not happening.
This is doubly true in mobile, where subsidies have to go up the stack to carriers and even manufacturers. The market is a bazaar where everyone wants you to pay before you can play.
This limits Ubuntu’s options. You can only get so far on downloads and the charisma of your chairman. Can Ubuntu get farther, or is it doomed to be a minor player?
I know Ubuntu has many friends here. I like to think I’m one of them. Ubuntu has opened many markets by offering localized versions of its software in many languages.
It can rely on others’ efforts, like the Linux Foundation, to draw in applications by supporting the Linux Standard Base. It is also supporting Moblin, hosted by the Foundation, as its mobile phone solution.
But all this is low-hanging fruit. If Ubuntu can’t gain any retail foothold, if it can’t win share in netbooks or on phones, how far can it really go? And how should it get there?
June 8th, 2009
Invisible Linux
To Jim Zemlin you need no longer care about your operating system.
You don’t buy an operating system. You buy a gadget that runs a program. The gadget and its software are one unit.
I call this Invisible Linux.
Once again, the channel has been lost to Windows. Efforts to use Taiwanese OEMS and their tiny netbooks to create real competition for Windows at retail have been lost.
But Jim Zemlin is not deterred. Nor should Linux advocates. Because what he is suggesting has a certain logic to it.
This is the pitch he gave at CompuTex. Use Linux in your gadget, show only the application, and capture the extra margin.
I have seen people on this trip sporting the new HTC Mobile phone, a Google Android phone made in Taiwan, so the message is getting through. You don’t need to know if your GPS system is running Linux, or your phone, or any other embedded device performing a set of defined tasks.
At the same time you don’t need to know that Google runs Linux, that most top Web sites run Apache servers under Linux, or that your office may be running Linux right now, while what looks like your Windows desktop is actually a virtualizer.
Bill Gates’ heirs have done a masterful job pushing Windows up and down the channel. But tomorrow’s products may not use that channel. They may not need it.
Who cares whether Linux is visible or invisible, so long as it’s there? Do you?
Loading ...June 3rd, 2009
To Jim Zemlin this CompuTex represents progress
My impressions about a failure of Linux to break through at CompuTex are based on observations of this year’s show floor. I was not here previously
But this is not Jim Zemlin’s first rodeo. The executive director of the Linux Foundation told me he is seeing great momentum for Linux at this show.
I spoke with Zemlin (right, at right) following his talk before a few hundred people in a conference room at the Taiwan World Trade Center (TWTC), a subsidiary venue for CompuTex. The main exhibits are in the Nangang Exhibition space several miles away.
There are really two shows here, he said, one that you see and one that you don’t.
“If you look at the show floor you’re only seeing half the picture,” he said.
“The argument I just made is real and people in Taiwan understand it and are looking for an alternative to Windows. They live in a world of very tight margins, of hyper competition, they struggle every day to differentiate. That comes from software, and Windows does not provide that diferentiation.”
Zemlin’s talk was scheduled after a talk on the Moblin project, which Intel has since passed on to the Foundation. The talk on Moblin seemed to draw more excitement than Zemlin’s discussion of Linux. Dozens of people left the room after he began speaking.
This did not discourage him one bit, just as the Taiwanese habit of listening quietly and offering little reaction to what is heard did not discourage him. Nothing seems to discourage Jim Zemlin.,
In response to a question about Moblin and Android, he admitted that Android currently has an advantage, because of the HTC phones already on the market. But he predict Moblin will shine in the coming “convergence” world where laptops and phones become one.
“In the next 6-12 months, when you start seeing Moblin devices in the market, when it’s productized, you’ll see developer interest go crazy,” he predicted.
While we sat we also compared netbooks. I showed him the HP Mini 1000 I bought at Fry’s, which only had Windows versions. He showed me an identical device (only with more internal memory) he had bought at the HP web site, for the same price I paid, and with Ubuntu Linux installed.
As in so many things Zemlin’s answer to problems in the channel is to find another channel. Actions to live by.
May 13th, 2009
The new Linux.com is open for business
The Linux Foundation has opened the doors on its new Linux.com, a new news, discussion and blogging site which looks a little like ZDNet.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Personally I’m flattered.
My point is that the new site goes well beyond simple discussions of Linux. It’s heavy into applications, even those which, like Firefox, are best known as Windows apps. It follows the news.
The Firefox story is actually a link from a Linux Magazine article by ZDNet’s own Joe Brockmeier. It’s a good article.
Zonker has been following the Linux.com story closely, quoting the Foundation’s promises in March to make the new site a “community resource… for the community, by the community.”
Question. Which community?
The answer can be drawn either narrowly or broadly. Narrowly, it’s about the Linux operating system and applications that run on Linux. Broadly, it’s also about open source, the community ethos arising from it, the values of those communities, and the future of the Internet.
These are questions publishers, editors and writers are constantly fussing over. The editor’s answer is it depends on what the readers want. The publisher’s answer is it depends on what the advertiser wants, what the market the site seeks to serve wants.
It will be fun to see how the Linux Foundation, a non-profit consortium, answers that question over the next weeks, months and years. Y’all are a publisher now.
What do the readers think should be its answer?
April 27th, 2009
Samsung asks if i7500 is the Android you have been looking for
Samsung is releasing its first phone using Google’s Android software, the i7500 (right, from our Crave blog).
Is this the Android you have been looking for?
Andrew Nusca at the Toybox notes that it has a real touch screen, built-in GPS, WiFi support, a 5 GByte Megapixel camera and up to 40 Gbyte of memory when you add a MicroSD card.
Our British unit notes the phone will be released in Germany through O2. No pricing has been announced.
Personally I would love one of these babies for my trip to CompuTex, especially since the camera is said to be self-focusing.
Pictures would be easy to transfer to the blog since I already have the GIMP ediing software loaded and could move the photos directly to my new Netbook on the SD card.
Of course, I can do that already with my present camera set-up, which is about a year old. But the GPS would be cool if I got lost somewhere in Asia.
The big news is that even if this is not the Android you are looking for another will be along presently. Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Acer have all said they are working on Android kit. Samsung is just the second manufacturer with product, following HTC of Taiwan.
This is supposed to mean very active competition but also a single cooperative community of users. It’s the construction of the community, not the App store, that gives Android its potential punch.
And then when you consider that Netbooks running Android could be announced as early as CompuTex in June, and delivered to U.S. buyers in time for Christmas, that could really be starting something.
April 4th, 2009
The Linux laptops of 2009
The Linux laptop business represents a Chinese industry trying to serve a Western market and getting lost in the translation.
(Shown is the Dell Inspiron Netbook with a coffee mug, actual size.)
The Chinese like cheap, and they understand the cellphone business model. When Westerners look at the product, however, we want usable keyboards, acceptable screens and compatibility with the files we used last year.
The first generation of Linux laptops ran an Intel Atom chip set. They were underpowered, but Microsoft found a way to get Windows XP on them, at $3 per copy, then Windows 7, at an unknown price, so they are less of an adjustment.
The next generation of Linux laptops will run the same ARM system used in phones, which is why Chinese makers are looking to Android, a phone operating system, as their guide.
The total hardware cost is about $20. Everything else is the case and the bling. With a 1 GHz ARM chip and $200 price point Microsoft may be unable to compete. At least for now.
Ubuntu is able to go there, and announced an alliance with ARM last year. Its kit will sport a version of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix system first shown last year. A beta release of a new version shipped April 2.
Another route to a Linux laptop may be the Qualcomm Snapdragon system, shown running phones during CES. As I noted, at this point the only physical difference between a netbook and a phone is the case.
But there is an enormous difference in the buyers and their expectations. The result could be an historic disconnect between manufacturers and consumers.
All of which makes June’s CompuTex in Taiwan a very important show. It runs from June 2-6 and it’s already being called the show of the “all in one” PC.
What’s needed here are the views of Western users, not just manufacturers and OEMs. Last year’s product failed because it ignored this viewpoint.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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