14 DAY TRIAL // The Sunnyvale, California based MontaVista Software company has announced the release of the Mobilinux 4.1, a Linux-based operating system which is targeting the smartphone market. This Linux mobile operating system is designed for scalability and maximized battery power usage, and has an incredible boot time of less than 1 second.
John Jackson, senior analyst at the Yankee Group, an information technology and market research advisory firm, said that ?for handset manufacturers, sustainable competitive advantage requires cost and time-to-market efficiencies and product differentiation. Globally, manufacturers are looking to Linux as the platform for their next generation designs. MontaVista Software?s work in adapting Linux for the mobile handset market has catalyzed a platform migration movement among many of the top manufacturers. MontaVista Linux alone now powers 20 million phones. Most of these are in Asia with tremendous expansion beginning in the European and North American markets.?
This comes to confirm what Kevin Morgan, the Engineering vice president at MontaVista software has declared at the launch of the operating system in April 25th 2005: ?The pressure to deliver new, unique handset features and mobile data services is causing software requirements to outstrip the capabilities of aging real-time operating systems. Handset manufacturers see Mobilinux as an opportunity to move towards an open, full-featured operating system. Unlike proprietary operating systems, Mobilinux is a scalable platform allowing mobile operators, handset manufacturers, and developers to build differentiated feature- and smart-phones.?
The Mobilinux OS has the features that could make it one of the top three operating systems on the global mobile phone market: footprint improvements, uClibc to create full featured C/C++ applications, DirectFB for applications with more graphic support, Squashfs which delivers more system capacity for data storage, more stability and reliability, advanced real-time support, DPM (Dynamic Power Management) a technology that permits real-time power performance improvement of the smartphone and many others that could elongate the list for at least one more page.