Challenges facing mobile device manufacturers:

Advantages of Mobilinux

Challenges Facing the Mobile Device Industry

The explosion in mobile phone adoption over the past several decades is unprecedented in the history of technology. With estimates of over 2.7 billion in use around the world, the mobile phone has emerged as one of the most ubiquitous devices anywhere; however, as penetration rates have risen, so have challenges for mobile phone manufacturers.

As the mobile phone market matures, vendors are increasingly competing with each other over a replacement business. To rise above the clutter, some vendors pursue a differentiation strategy, adding intelligence to the device, often to the point where the capabilities of today's phones are surpassing those of yesterday's PCs.

Other vendors are meeting the challenge by focusing on low-cost, low-priced products. Either way, competitive trends are forcing mobile phone vendors to focus on the dual needs of bringing innovative products to market quickly, while at the same time optimizing costs, both in terms of development and bill-of-materials (BOM).

Emergence of Linux

Handset manufacturers are discovering that traditional proprietary platforms no longer provide the flexibility they require to differentiate themselves, and are too costly and difficult to extend to provide the innovative services required by mobile operators.

Commercial-grade Linux, on the other hand, gives operators a flexible, open platform they can tailor to meet their development platform requirements. And as mobile phones incorporate greater amounts computing device features, Linux is emerging as an ideally suited platform to develop this functionality. Further, Linux offers the opportunity to standardize platforms deployed in networks, reducing the amount of time necessary to deploy applications and services and thereby reduce operating expenses.

Tailoring Mobilinux to the Needs of the Mobile Devices

Many "smart phones" utilize separate application and baseband processors and also include separate memory for each processor; however, these dual processors add cost to the BOM and reduce batter life. Further, the dedicated baseband processor typically requires a second operating system, decreasing development efficiency and adding development cost. These high-end devices typically feature an application-focused operating system as well as a hardened RTOS to handle the extreme response-time requirements of communicating between the protocol stack and the back-end infrastructure. Failing to meet response-time requirements leads to dropped calls; a behavior that is unacceptable to operator whose customers will often blame the network rather than the device.

MontaVista has incorporated technical advances into its Mobilinux offering that have resulted in dramatically improved response time. These improvements enable the Mobilinux platform to meet the "hard real-time" requirements of baseband processing while also delivering rich application, gaming, and multimedia capabilities - all driven by a single processor. Using Mobilinux to support single-chipset designs allows handset manufacturers to deliver high-end functionality at significantly reduced prices.

Other technological advances designed for mobile phones found in Mobilinux include:

Because Mobilinux is highly modular and fully open, handset manufacturers can easily layer additional features and capabilities as needed to create a wide range of differentiated devices addressing various market segments and device classes. This allows device manufacturers to streamline their internal development costs while maintaining architectural freedom and flexibility. Mobilinux provides a highly scalable platform that helps reduce fragmentation while providing the control and functionality necessary to prevent commoditization and enable the delivery of advanced application and data services.