EVENTS and ANNOUNCEMENTS

CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES

Open Handset Alliance
Gorilla in Sheep’s Clothing?
MIPS Mulls Microcontrollers
New 32-bit MCU Line
GMACs GAP
ESL Spans the Software/Hardware Chasm
Industrial Revolution
Freescale Helps Consolidate Control
From Servers to Smartphones
Virtualization Invades Embedded
Happy Birthday
Embedded Tech Journal Turns Two
Breaking New Ground
ARM Dev Con and Stuff
Ritual Ring
Behind the Canadian Engineering Obligation

Open Handset Alliance
Gorilla in Sheep’s Clothing?

Everyone covering embedded technology has at least heard rumblings about open source mobile phones.  We even have the OpenMoko Neo1973 out there wooing open source developers and attracting publicity, but it isn’t clear that the stranglehold of the service providers will relax enough to bring these open-source platforms to prominence. 

The concept of open-source mobile device platforms is, of course, attractive.  Developers around the world can realize their visions of amazing applications for the mobile platform of the future, and, thanks to the glorious open source platform, the world will be their oyster, giving them an open market of potentially hundreds of millions of handsets to infect with their viru-, uh, I mean “enrich with their software.”  OK, so, perhaps completely open platforms face some security challenges as well.

The real challenge to open source phone deployment, however, is getting them into any percentage of the THREE BILLION consumers’ hands (yes, that’s a real number), past the watchful and greedy eyes of the service providers.  In the US, this is particularly tricky, as there is a long-standing tradition of the service providers controlling the game, choosing which handset manufacturers get to play, and carefully metering what software and services are deployed in order to protect profit margins. [more]