May 12th, 2009
oFono is Intel hail mary play in mobility
Those seeking to hit Intel with antitrust charges conveniently ignore there are huge and growing markets where it remains a bit player.
Mobility is one of them.
Now the company is trying one more time with oFono, an attempt by both it and longtime market leader Nokia to remain relevant on a playing field now dominated by Apple and Google’s Android.
More than just another high-tech misspelling, oFono seeks to define a new mobile stack which, while efficient, also limits the technologies that can be layered on top of it. (Get a bigger copy of the illustration above at the oFono Web site.)
From the announcement post of Marcel Holtmann, from the Intel Open Source Technology Center:
oFono is licensed under GPLv2, and it includes a high-level D-Bus API for use by telephony applications of any license. oFono also includes a low-level plug-in API for integrating with Open Source as well as third party telephony stacks, cellular modems and storage back-ends. The plug-in API functionality is modeled on public standards, in particular 3GPP TS 27.007 “AT command set for User Equipment (UE).”
Sounds pretty open source-y, no? Sounds more open source-y than thou.
But if Intel and Nokia are defining what goes in the center of the stack, it’s a real hardware power play.
I may well be wrong, but I suspect the lower levels of the smartphone stack have already been spoken for. Bringing out a new one, even one built at the lowest level of the open source incline, may no longer be enough to win out over Intel’s and Nokia’s rivals.
It may be, as Barney Frank once observed, “the biggest hail mary play in the history of football. Or marys.”
But as a lover of competition I would be delighted to be proven wrong.
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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