Hybrid Mobile OS?
There’s a new article at FireceWireless by Gerry Purdy entitled "Mobile Linux: Why it will become the dominant mobile OS" which I can’t help commenting on.
Gerry argues that in mobile, there is more value in the services and applications than in the OS Kernel. He says…
"In mobile, it’s more important to work on the user interface and user experience than it is to focus on the OS like it is done on the PC. "
And..
"Microsoft and Symbian will have to adapt their services to run on top of Linux. It seems plausible that UIQ (a Symbian subsidiary that focused on the user experience) should operate on top of Linux rather than the Symbian core to be more efficient. Economically, I believe all of the current mobile OS vendors will come to realize that the value in the total offering is in the services and applications not in the OS kernel and, as a result, will shift their offerings to become value added suppliers to the Linux ecosystem. "
Unfortunately, the article talks of a common or open source mobile Linux kernel as though it is likely to exist. I am sceptical. Also, I would argue that a mobile kernel is more important and difficult to produce/maintain than Gerry realises. A large amount of effort has gone into the Windows Mobile and Symbian OS kernels to make them suitable for mobile. Furthermore, having worked on kernel, services and applications, I know that the services and applications are often tightly bound to special mechanisms provided by the kernel. It’s just not a case of swapping out one kernel and plugging in another. If even possible, the huge effort required to do this would probably not be economically justified. A resulting kernel/services hybrid would also involve translations between different idioms which would make it difficult to understand, extend and support.
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