The Rise of the Linux-Based Cellphone

mrscotty99 writes with a link to a Linux.com article about the rising star that is the Linux-based cellphone. Author Murry Shohat argues that the transformation of the cell into a mini-PC this summer is a landmark opportunity for Linux. Apple's offering and Motorola's US launch of the RAZR2 V8 (a linux-based device) may be heralds of great things to come for a new OS frontier: "In the cell phone market, consumers will pay for content, and corporations need to deliver secure content to applications in the palm of employees' hands. These trends suggest products that are simultaneously more functional and less expensive than a Treo or BlackBerry and more secure than an iPhone. MontaVista Software claims to have deployed Mobilinux on more than 35 million mobile devices worldwide. CEO Tom Kelley says, 'Linux is growing rapidly on mobile devices because of its solid reliability, its great flexibility, and because it accelerates the development cycle.' Vendors using or contemplating the use of Linux for mobile devices unanimously point to the operating system's footprint, memory usage, and fast growing ecosystem of developers producing software for graphics, multimedia, connectivity, and security." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge.

The Neo 1973 is freer than anything motorola has.

[Alphager (957739)]

http://openmoko.com/ [openmoko.com]
- Touchscreen
- WLAN
- completely open
- A-GPS

Re:The Neo 1973 is freer than anything motorola ha

[KiloByte (825081)]

Now imagine this:
1. use VoIP from the cellphone (duh!)
2. GPG-encrypt the data stream, without relying on AT&T's proprietary "encryption" which goes directly to whichever government asks for it
3. use the existing GPG web of trust for keys; generate a new key for the phone and sign it with your main key so if the phone is stolen you lose only the phone's secret key

The above makes you imprevious to plain main-in-the-middle snooping. What is left is information whom you talk to.

4. get an account at a company/group of volunteers who provide a number of servers; the more such independent group of this kind the better
5. have the phone connect only to the nearest server of your group; this is all the phone company can find out about you
6. once there, the server will peel the outer onion layer, connecting to the next hop
7. these servers will be usually already connected as conversations can be aggregated into a single connection; if not, random data can be sent through idle links to thwart traffic analysis
8. unless you're paranoid, the next hop will be your interlocutor's privacy company/group. 2 hops should be enough for most cases, but if you value privacy more than latency, toss in full onion routing.

While Tor is WAAAY too slow to allow for usable VoIP, having a network of servers connected with opaque noise-filled pipes should give you decent enough privacy with just two geographically close hops.

Re:The Neo 1973 is freer than anything motorola ha

[CRCulver (715279)]

About ten years ago encryption was much more in vogue than it is now. The geeks who were the elite of the Internet even so late widely had PGP keys and sometimes went to key-signing events. Publishing on public applications of cryptography was vast: O'Reilly had a PGP guide and Bruce Schneier's great Applied Cryptography [amazon.com] appeared. PGPfone and Speakeasy promised to give us secure voice communication.

Now look at what has happened. Today's geeks rarely show interest in GPG, even when they rave about other free software achievements. Figures like Bruce Schneier chose to focus on other aspects of computer security, and O'Reilly doesn't publish anything to show your average computer-literate fellow how to secure his communications. PGPfone was never maintained, and nothing appears to have come to replace it, even in bold new apps like Ekiga. And the web of trust has stagnated because (reliable) key signings are rare.

Your idea of a GPG-capable phone is something I find cool, but sadly encryption no longer captivates people like it once did.

Re:

[gnu-generation-one (717590)]

"While Tor is WAAAY too slow to allow for usable VoIP, having a network of servers connected with opaque noise-filled pipes should give you decent enough privacy with just two geographically close hops."

Especially if some of those hops are routed via bluetooth or WiFi rather than GPRS... (the call might just disappear into a mesh network, well away from telephone wiretaps)

Re:

[st0nes (1120305)]

Very nice, but no camera, 2.5G. Surely they should launch with a 3G version since 3G has been standard for so long? Also price: $300 is a bit steep.

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[Aladrin (926209)]

I've been watching this for a while, and I almost bought a dev phone. But the extra features on the full retail one are much more interesting to me. I thought the target for the retail phone was October, but I see things like:

"We're almost for sure going to use their AR6K
chipset in our next product."

I hope that just means they haven't updated that portion of the site in a while, and not that they still have no clue what the hardware design is.

I see elsewhere that Oct and Nov are set for testing, and late

Re:The Neo 1973 is freer than anything motorola ha

[Gizmhail (821391)]

You might find useful information (concerning the first OpenMoko compatible phone) on this page : http://wiki.openmoko.org/index.php?title=Neo1973 [openmoko.org]
The end user version is the one named "Phase 2" (GTA02, "Mass Market").
Allong with hardware specs, you'll find there an estimated timeline :
        * Sep 20 - GTA02v3 design finalised.
        * Oct 20 - GTA02v3 design produced, and shipped to qualified developers.
        * Nov 20 - GTA02v3 design verified through testing by developers.
        * Dec 10 - GTA02v3 produced in moderate volume
        * Dec 20 - GTA02v3 goes on sale
        * Dec 25 - GTA02v3 arrives

Re:

[Aladrin (926209)]

Yeah, I condensed that to "I see elsewhere that Oct and Nov are set for testing, and late December for shipping the final product."

Wake me up when openmoko supports CDMA networks.

[melstav (174456)]

The Neo 1973 is GSM-only. OpenMoko doesn't have a phone that supports CDMA network providers, like Sprint. Nor do they have plans to in the foreseeable future.

By contrast, I am confident that Motorola WILL release a variant of their phone that works on Sprint's network.

Open source ideals are great and all, but if it doesn't meet my requirements (I'm not going to buy it.

And for the foreseeable future, "Does it work on Sprint's network?" is one of my requirements.

Re:The Neo 1973 is freer but has no wlan

[MichaelSmith (789609)]

The version to be released in October is supposed to have wireless networking.

Re:

[GooberToo (74388)]

Unofficially there are rumblings of a December/January release.

Re:

[FireFury03 (653718)]

The version to be released in October is supposed to have wireless networking.

Unfortunately it looks like the schedule has slipped and general availability will be Christmas.

Personally, I'm holding out for a UMTS version, although they've given no indication when this is likely to happen. (I've had enough of the crappness of GPRS to last me a life time).

Re:

[MichaelSmith (789609)]

here it is [openmoko.org]

Re:

[Down_in_the_Park (721993)]

thanks, so lets wait for the next version. Using a mobile phone for accessing the internet via UMTS is way too expensive.

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[Creepy (93888)]

bah - if it doesn't have a CLI [wikipedia.org] I can text in, it ain't Linux. ;)

Re:

[Workaphobia (931620)]

I know you were trying to be funny, but what on Earth makes you think it doesn't have a CLI? It *IS* Linux after all.

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Manually_using_GSM [openmoko.org]

4 choices

[BadAnalogyGuy (945258)]

You don't have that many OS choices when developing a cellphone.

Obviously, you can go with a market leader like Symbian and Nokia's S60 software stack to get something out the door in a hurry.

Alternatively, you can pay a bunch up front to get the hardware working with Linux, but the benefits are a royalty-free OS license.

You could always ask Microsoft for some help, but your fast time to market and full-featureset come at the price of outrageously powerful hardware requirements.

Finally, you can go with BREW, Qualcomm's stripped-down, barebones OS.

Each OS has its benefits and tradeoffs. Linux's benefits are code "ownership" and full source access, not to mention a well-known API and a large pool of developers. The major tradeoff that I've seen is the enormous latency in normal usage. A keypress takes a significantly longer time to process on a Linux phone than on, say, a BREW phone or an MS Smartphone.

There's a lot of growth to come in the cellphone market, so Symbian has a long fight against these up and comers. And there really isn't anywhere for anyone (excluding Symbian) to go but up.

Re:

[TubeSteak (669689)]

You don't have that many OS choices when developing a cellphone.

Does it really matter what OS a phone runs when, for the majority of people, they're going to be stuck using the shitty, feature stripped firmware the phone ships with?

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[BadAnalogyGuy (945258)]

It matters if you're the one developing the phone.

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[CRCulver (715279)]

We here are hardly the majority of people. Isn't this a "News for nerds" site? The OS the phone ships with matters to many here because of Free Software ethics and hackability.

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[smilindog2000 (907665)]

The real benefit of open-systems on a cell phone are far beyond the typically quoted "time-to-market" and "cost-of-ownership" stuff. My Motorola Razr is a fine phone, but nothing more. For anything other than making phone calls, it completely sucks. I can't even take and share pictures freely, and the charge for simple text messages is just stupid. I personally never intend to own another stupid Symbian based phone again.

In comparison, now that hackers have dissected it, the iPhone is a tiny laptop in m

Re:4 choices

[Propaganda13 (312548)]

You do know that Apple is entirely against everything you just said. Apple is part of the problem. Your post is like thanking Microsoft because the XBox was hacked to run Linux.

Now, the FIC NEO1973 will hopefully show the industry how it's done.

Re:

[Molt (116343)]

I've been doing all of those things, with the exception of the P2P voice development, on my HTC Universal (Orange M5000) [engadget.com] for nearly two years now- and that was by no means the first device which offered this kind of functionality.

Please, if you're going to credit anyone with opening up the true power of Smartphones don't make it Apple.. any openness of their device is purely accidental, not unlike the Sony PSP, and is likely to be reduced more and more as they patch. With regards to actually promoting e

Re:

[Andy Dodd (701)]

It's sad to say, but with respect to "openness" to developers, Windows Mobile is actually in the lead right now. (Except for possibly Symbian which I have ZERO experience with, but other posts indicate it is less free.)

iPhone - well, that is clearly a closed system. Any "openness" is a lucky hack.

BREW - ugh...

Linux-on-phone - You would expect it to be free, but with the exception of OpenMoko, it seems like Linux-on-phone tends to be "Tivoized". The quotes in the article summary imply that manufacturers l

Re:

[smilindog2000 (907665)]

I might be confused... does Symbian have an open-source toolchain I can use to freely write apps for my phone? That's the key distinction. I never want to own another closed phone again :-)

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[delire (809063)]

How is Apple's iPhone 'open' exactly?

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[david.given (6740)]

Or there's Nucleus, VxWorks, QNX, one of the several proprietary phone OSs (you'll probably only pick one of these if you're part of the same group that owns the OS)... there are lots of RTOSs out there that are suitable for phones, especially the low-end phones that you wouldn't want to run a heavyweight OS on.

The thing I'm surprised about is that nobody (we hear about) seems to be using BSD. The BSDs are traditionally easier to port than Linux, and have a much friendlier license to commercial use; so wh

Re:

[jonwil (467024)]

Can you get BSD drivers for or or whatever other hardware the phone has? Most likely its simply the case that linux has better support right now for the hardware todays phones actually have.
And it has commercial support from several vendors (MontaVista for example) for running on various ARM based CPUs and platforms including those used by the cellphone companies.

BSD based cell phone

[slashnot007 (576103)]

Are people excited about a Linux Cell phone or a Unix cell phone. If the latter why not a BSD based cell phone. Like say the Iphone.

Re:

[GooberToo (74388)]

Each OS has its benefits and tradeoffs. Linux's benefits are code "ownership" and full source access, not to mention a well-known API and a large pool of developers.

I'm not sure if you're including this in your ,"large pool of developers", comment but, these days making the phone developer accessible after sale is starting to garner a fair bit of interest. In this regard, Linux can't be touched.

The major tradeoff that I've seen is the enormous latency in normal usage. A keypress takes a sigificantly longer

Re:

[GooberToo (74388)]

A keypress takes a significantly longer time to process on a Linux phone than on, say, a BREW phone or an MS Smartphone.

Sorry, I forgot to add this to my previous post. My Razor has one of the slowest interfaces I've ever seen on a phone, including phones I had five plus years ago. Button presses are often dropped. The user interface is horrible, kludgie, and beyond snail-slow. IIRC, my Razor is running Symbian. My point being, crappy user interfaces which create high latency key presses (or worst of a

Re:

[GooberToo (74388)]

Notice that I didn't compare Linux's latency to Symbian.

I hate to burst your bubble but Linux typically has lower latency than most other commercial RT OSs. Linux in no way, shape, or form, is considered a high latency beast, save only on the desktop, and that's because it is geared toward throughput, not low latency; which in turn explains why Linux typically stomps on Windows for throughput.

I've not done any phone development but I do RT development. If are experiencing latency issues, I suggest it may

Apple's Offering?

[flydpnkrtn (114575)]

Apple's offering AFAIK is a mobile version of OSX... what does that have to do with Linux?

By my accounts, Apple has been hostile to the open source community. They take and don't give back. Look at their track record with OSX and not setting up a source repository.

Making iPods intentionally not work with anything but iTunes (which was cracked only days later)? Creating iWork instead of helping the OS X version OpenOffice.org?

Apple would BE Microsoft, and Charman Jobs would be Gates, if they had the option.

Re:

[smilindog2000 (907665)]

Jobs may be an a-hole, but he's damned smart. OS-X (on Macs and iPhones) is just open enough to allow hackers freedom to innovate, while just closed enough for Jobs to charge whatever he wants for the OS, while controlling the QA for average users ("It just works - TM" to quote another /.-er). Jobs absolutely wants to be Gates, and he's using open-source as leverage against Microsoft, for his own benefit rather than for open-source developers. It's never been said that Jobs is just trying to make the wor

Re:

[0100010001010011 (652467)]

It was a hash not encryption. Get over it. It's more than likely for data integrity than "ZOMG WE R GONIN TO BREAK LINUX".

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[flydpnkrtn (114575)]

From Apple Cuts Off Linux iPod Users [slashdot.org]: "This appears to be protection against 3rd party applications writing out their own databases."

Why wasn't the hash used on the old iPods sufficient? And if it was just to ensure integrity of files stored on the iPod, why not just go ahead and publish how the hash is computed, instead of the community having to reverse engineer it?

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[aliquis (678370)]

Yeah because iWork and OpenOffice are more or less the same thing, or not.

OpenOffice tries to be Office, and word suck.

iWork is similair applications but in a new fresh way, how dare you compare Pages with OO writer?

Just stay with your openoffice in whatever os ..

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[phooka.de (302970)]

By my accounts, Apple has been hostile to the open source community. They take and don't give back. Look at their track record with OSX and not setting up a source repository.

Darwin is Open Source. WebKit has been a great contribution. But they never give back. Get your facts straight first, then think, then post.

Re:

[flydpnkrtn (114575)]

Darwin was an open source project, that never gained traction or support from Apple. From Wikipedia: "OpenDarwin was a community-led operating system based on the Darwin platform, founded in April 2002 by the Internet Software Consortium and Apple. In July 2006, the OpenDarwin Core Team and Administrators announced that all development on OpenDarwin would cease, citing concerns over lack of interest from the community."

See also Open-source Darwin? Not yet [macnn.com]. My favorite part: "Apple is stonewalling open-sourc

iphone OS is open sourced

[goombah99 (560566)]

Darwin is open source. And you are a troll.

Don't forget about Qtopia

[rumith (983060)]

Personally I find this [trolltech.com] announcement much more interesting and relevant to the goal of getting Linux on the mobiles. In short: Trolltech has made available the telephony service, DRM and SaX available under GPLv2, thus making Qtopia Phone edition completely free. Besides, they have ported Qtopia to Neo 1973. This is most certainly very good news!

Other Linux Mobile Phone Manufacturers

[wehe (135130)]

Motorola is no the only manufacturer offering mobile phones with Linux operating system. Here is an overview of mobile phones with Linux pre-installed [tuxmobil.org]. The entries marked with an asterisk *) show around twenty manufacturers which offer Linux on mobile cellular phones.

This is the year of the Linux phone!

[aliquis (678370)]

Subject says it all.

I wonder how long it will take until Amiga Inc. revives the never released Amiga DE and decide that it's the shit for 2008s mobile phones! ..

Just make your own, if you're nerd enough

[DrSkwid (118965)]

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php?cPath=66_68 [sparkfun.com]

Perfect cliche

[Ed Avis (5917)]

I stopped reading the article when I got to the words 'perfect storm'.

I want to pay for content too!!

[DrSkwid (118965)]

> In the cell phone market, consumers will pay for content

Yeah, where's my Linux Phone, I got spare $ to burn on ringtones and wallpapers.

I have a NEO1973 (OpenMoko) ..

[torpor (458)]

.. and its a really, really great device even though the developer version is missing a few things (accelerometers, WLAN) .. there is really nothing quite so fun as being able to write software for your own cell phone, and do things that just wouldn't be possible elsewhere.

I'm looking forward, for example, to having my own answering service onboard with a user-selectable set of recordings to playback (IVR-style application), and some music-making apps are on the horizon as well ..

Lovely bit of gear; I will definitely upgrade to GTA02 when its available, too.

Re:

[MichaelSmith (789609)]

I will definitely upgrade to GTA02 when its available, too.

Yes that is the phone I want to get. But because I can't try it in the shop I have a question which you may be able to answer: can you carry the OpenMoko around in your pocket, or is it a belt pouch phone? I have seen the dimensions on the web site but it is not the same as holding one in your hand.

PDA

[Dan East (318230)]

I hope linux makes significant inroads, but I fear it will make as big of an impact in the cellular arena as it did in the PDA market.

Dan East

*SMACKS FOREHEAD*

[sharkey (16670)]

Motorola's US launch of the RAZR2 V8

I could have had a V8!