14 DAY TRIAL // Trolltech CTO Benoit Schillings emphasizes all that Linux can provide for mobile phone users that choose to switch to this operating platform.
Market research firm ABI has recently predicted that the number of mobile phones that will be shipped with Linux already installed will reach 200 million until 2012. That is a considerably high figure if compared to the 8,1 million such devices that are currently working on Linux.
"With Nokia and Palm's recent announcements in support of Linux, we see a lot more promise around the growing shipments of Linux-based devices in the marketplace", said CTO Benoit Schillings.
Trolltech is a Norwegian company with two product lines: Qt and Qtopia. The fact that Nokia and Palm have announced to support Linux and increased the market share of devices that operate on this platform is highly encouraging. The main advantage that Linux brings is that mobile phones can be customized much easier.
The CTO at Benoit Schillings has declared that a larger mobile phone producer might force the handset market if it chose Linux as their operating program. Actually, this is the case with Nokia, which makes it clear that the future is promising and that the predicted number of units using Linux by 2012 will indeed be reached. Among the current operators, the most important companies must be mentioned when it comes to mobile phone products and services. This includes Motorola, Palm, Nokia and also mobile service operators such as Vodafone, Orange and NTT DoCoMo.
Mobile Linux is compelled by a great number of requirements, such as battery usage and boot speed. Furthermore, the footprint space allocation and Flash-based applications must be reduced to a dimension that is compatible with the small memory space that is available.
For this, Qtopia software is so flexible that it proves to be a great solution for Linux-based software development. Moreover, the future will most probably bring this platform on a great number of devices, from VoIP to PC and even on Digital VCR.