Linux dials up mobile phones

Hi, my name is Peder Ulander. I'm the Vice President of Marketing at MontaVista Software and today I'm going to tell you a little bit about how Linux is dialing up the mobile phone market. At the end of 2008, all the market research from actual estimates are to be somewhere in the neighborhood of about a billion phones shipped, and a lot of the things driving this increased adoptions in mobile phones is the fact that operators and handset manufacturers are changing their services from traditional voice to moving more towards rich content and rich applications actually being delivered down to the mobile handset.

Now, as we shift from voice to data, there's a number of things that actually have to change in the overall design of mobile handsets. From the voice perspective, the hardware is actually what drives a lot of the things. As we move over to a data based solution, the most important element actually now comes in the form of software because at the end of the day, what you're doing is you're delivering a number of Rich Media Formats ranging from audio, video, voice on demand, even the push-to-talk capabilities.

The market is actually shaping up into three very distinct segments. The first one is the traditional voice because there always will be folks that really all they need is a dial tone and a connection and that actually represents about 25% of the total market in 2008. The other side which is not entirely new to the market is the smart phone, the PDA, the web browser, the traditional phones that we've seen in the market today and that actually represents somewhere around 20% of the total market place. This is where you're going to see your Palm Treo, some of your Microsoft Smart Phones or some of your Symbian Smart Phones. The real opportunity, though, happens to be in the feature phone segment. OM estimates this to actually be somewhere in the neighborhood of about 55%.

From a voice perspective, really the traditional operating system that sits in the phone market is focused solely on the hardware, the operating system and the telephony. What does that mean, that means that if you do want to add new services, regardless of whether something as simple as a java application to a robust calendar set, it's extremely ineffective from a cost perspective and a quality perspective to bolt that stuff on to the traditional voice service. Now, the flip side is, you can take a look at a smart phone. From the smart phone perspective, they actually have all other stuff integrated into the phone.

The problem for hardware vendors or for phone vendors is the fact that first off there's limited functionality with respect to what hardware you get to use. There is no customization with regards to your ability to add your own applications, your own brand, your own user experience; you're essentially running something that is extremely costly and extremely limited in a brand functionality that costs a lot.

Now why does Linux make sense? The interesting thing about Linux is the fact that it is an open flexible architecture where developers actually have the opportunity to go in and have choice on the hardware. There's a number of chipsets today that are delivered in mobile phones that actually run Linux. You have choice with regards to what type of operating system you run and in fact, you have access to all of the source code in Linux as well as access to a number of applications and components that you can build on top of that Linux. So what does that mean? Well, that means you may have the choice of seven different types of browsers. You have the choice to actually customize the middleware and the user interface to add your own brand. You have the choice to actually deliver some of the new network services whether they be voice or media or video down to that device and the number one thing that's actually driving this is, whereas, the smart phone delivering a lot of the same functionality costs $900, customers have been known to deliver this type of a solution down in the $100 phone range.

So when you look at it, both cost and customization actually enables handset vendors to become more competitive in the overall solution offering. That's why many solution providers are choosing Linux today.