Outlook on the application of the Linux operating system on mobile phones [reprint + comment]

The maturity of the mobile phone market is causing fierce competition between early market entry and new mobile phone manufacturers. As the market growth slows down, mobile phone manufacturers are increasingly competing for alternative services. The result is that there are only two ways for mobile phone manufacturers to take a lead, either in cost reduction or in performance. However, in all these circumstances, this trend has forced all manufacturers to fully optimize development and BOM costs.

For carriers, market maturity has led them to pay more attention to using additional services to increase average revenue (ARPU) for each user ). However, due to the lack of clear standards, when the operator tries to promote new services on a series of independent devices, it must incur huge costs and resource burden. To reduce this scattered situation, mobile operators are trying to promote the establishment of specifications throughout the industry.

Free from the same limitations

As mobile phone manufacturers and mobile operators continue to establish and deploy new functions and services as a means to expand their business in increasingly mature and competitive markets, they found that traditional proprietary development platforms could not fully meet their development needs. In addition, market pressure also forces mobile phone manufacturers to focus on value-added services while trying to control and reduce costs.

Figure: the mobile phone has become a complete client device
 

Traditional proprietary operating systems reduce the appearance of personalization and are expensive and difficult to provide innovative services. Mobile operators just want to improve ARPU with the help of new services.

Using Linux, operators can see the opportunity to directly affect the software platform and gain some degree of control they think is necessary to continue to expand their business.

Linux provides carriers with an extended open platform that can be tailored to meet operators' standards and specifications to avoid decentralization. At the same time, users can customize and provide personalized services.(Nokia uses the Symbian operating system, which has customized personalized services for mobile terminal users through the network, but does not implement cross-model personalized services for mobile phones of different models, http://www.nokia.com.cn/cn/support/software/index.shtml. Operators and developers can customize standard embedded mobile phone operating systems by reducing the performance of the Linux kernel to provide more customizable and modular personalized services for different types of mobile phones)

Other Proprietary Platforms provide few (or even completely incapable) personalized features or standardized services, which leads to product uniformity and decentralization.In view of the scalability of Linux, operators regard it as an excellent opportunity to configure a standardized platform in their own networks, which can reduce the testing workload required for deploying new applications and services and reduce operating costs..

Mobile phone manufacturers face similar problems when considering introducing the most advanced features to the market. Unlike operating systems with limited functionality (for basic mobile devices with limited resources), Linux is designed with a highly scalable architecture that ranges from a watch to a supercomputer.

After using Linux in their devices, mobile phone manufacturers can provide their users with a unique new experience that meets the specifications of operators and reduces the comprehensive cost of development and authentication. For this reason, many top mobile phone manufacturers have begun to regard Linux as a general solution that can play a role in a wide range of devices. Linux also allows them to develop a dynamic and highly competitive road map for the foreseeable future.

Rich applications

With the help of more powerful semiconductor components and operating environments, the performance of mobile phones is also constantly increasing, becoming a computation device with smaller sizes but complete functions, this gives the market an opportunity to provide a variety of advanced applications and game features (not necessary ). However, with the emergence of these advanced functions, the complexity of the system and the demand for enterprise-level development tools are also increasing. Fortunately, due to the growth in the enterprise environment, the Linux ecosystem is very suitable for the needs of advanced software development. Coupled with a large number of developers, a large number of existing application software, and a variety of powerful development tools for the Linux platform, these increase the selectivity and flexibility of software developers. Specifically, the eclipse-based development tools provided by multiple merchants have made Linux software development easier.

Eclipse provides a complete graphical development environment for software development and debugging, and can be easily used in workstations running Linux, Solaris, and Windows operating systems. With eclipse as the framework, the software development tool vendors provide a familiar software environment and can concentrate their resources on adding the most effective features to the product.

Expensive small batches of "smart phones" usually use independent applications and baseband processors, and also include dedicated memory for different processors. Too many semiconductor devices increase the design cost, while increasing the power consumption of the product, resulting in reduced battery life. Even worse, the dedicated baseband processor adds additional requirements for the second operating system, reducing development efficiency and increasing costs.

These high-end devices generally come with an application-centric operating system and a strict real-time operating system to deal with extremely demanding communication response time requirements between the protocol stack and the backend infrastructure. A failure to meet the response time requirement will lead to a disconnection of the phone, which is absolutely unacceptable to the operator because the customer will blame the network rather than the device.

The latest developments in the Linux field have greatly improved the response time. These improvements have enabled the optimized version of the platform to provide a wide range of applications, games, and multimedia performance while meeting the "hard real-time" needs of baseband processing, and all these are driven by a single processor. Using Linux in a design called "single chipset" enables mobile phone manufacturers to provide high-end features at a very low price.

Because Linux is highly modular and fully open, mobile phone manufacturers can easily layer additional features and features, A series of devices with different characteristics are developed to meet diversified market segmentation and equipment requirements. This allows device manufacturers to streamline their internal development costs while maintaining the autonomy and flexibility of the architecture.

Mature markets are driving the industry to find innovative new solutions. Carriers are trying to provide increasingly complex solutions at ever-decreasing prices. Next, the operator pushes these demands to mobile phone suppliers, who need to use the largest investment to develop special value-added functions and maintain flexibility to meet customer requirements.

Linux provides a highly scalable platform that helps reduce decentralization while providing control and product assimilation prevention capabilities. It also makes advanced applications and data services possible.