Intel To Challenge Android With Moblin For Mobile Devices

darien writes "Intel has officially entered the smartphone fight, giving a bullish demonstration at IDF of an Atom-based phone running the latest incarnation of its mobile Linux-based OS, dubbed Moblin for MIDs (mobile internet devices) v2.1. The system isn't aimed at current Atom CPUs, though — they're too power-hungry. 'One of the drivers of this initiative, and a key reason for the acquisition of Wind River, will be Intel's own app store, catering to ultra mobile devices based on the Atom chipset. The Intel Atom Developer Program will make use of Wind River's VxWorks product, which the company believes will help it achieve that developer grail of the 'write once and run on all devices' experience."

Stupid

[cheesybagel]

Stupid, stupid, stupid. The main selling point seems to be that it can run regular Linux apps. Which of course you would not want to do in the first place in devices with such a constrained screen size and different input methods. You are better off writing apps for that device instead. They should have just tried to improve Android instead.

Re:Wait... how?

[sunking2]

Because Green Hills is in the business of porting vxworks to any embedded system on the market. Green Hills provides the cross compilers. In fact, you probably can't even begin to think of introducing a new embedded cpu without talking with green hills to coordinate a port. It's kind of hard to shoot too many holes in a strategy that revolves around vxworks.

What's In A Name

[Ukab the Great]

From Moblin's site [moblin.org]:

Moblin uses Clutter to create exciting, efficient, and intuitive user interfaces.

Worthy competitor to Android, let alone Apple? Not a chance, and you can tell just by looking at the name that was chosen for the UI. But they'd probably have a good shot at Failblog.

Android already conver that market

[mhamel]

It's like the 80s and the begining of windows all over again but for mobile devices. The question is what will be the OS that can use the most software. Right now there are: IPhone OS which is very closed. Windows mobile also very closed and not sexy. Android which is open and has lots of backing by lot's of different builders. Many other smaller options. Moblin look very open too but.. when it will show up, Android should already available from every cellular providers.

What is funny in that mobile war is the position of Apple. Pretty much like when the first Mac came by at the begining of the 80s. They have a great product. But they are too closed. So it's going to be everybody against them. They can't win. Dell, HTC, Lenovo, Motorola, Philips, Samsung, Sony Ericson (on the open side this time) , and many others already have android phones.

I predict that soon when you'll want to build a mobile application, it will have to run on Android first. That way it will be available to everybody. The rest will be second thought. Just like the market for computer right OS now with windows. But this time the winner will be the open platform because it's been early in the market and the manufacturer will simply find it easier then going for windows mobile.

Good

[Lemming Mark]

I'd rather buy Moblin than Android on a mobile device. Android replaces basically every part of what we usually call "Linux", except for the kernel (which of course actually *is* Linux). Moblin has a heavily custom desktop environment but other than that it seems like a reasonably "normal" distribution. If I were to do any hacking on the device I'd bought, I'd like it to be a familiar environment. If I'm downloading others' apps I'd feel more confident in getting a good range of apps if they can code in a familiar environment.

Android's good because it's an open platform. I can easily believe that for really resource-constrained apps it's better than Moblin. But on anything that can handle it, I'd rather have a "real" distro than Android. The diversity of having multiple mobile platforms is a good thing; I just personally would rather be able to run a familiar Unix-like environment on all my devices, even if they use a custom front-end to fit the form factor. Improvements to infrastructure (kernel, X.org, shell, apps, whatever) required for a small device are something that I'd like to see integrated upstream so that everyone benefits.

Re:Android already conver that market

[tomtomtom777]

Windows mobile also very closed

How is that? Is Windows mobile more closed than Android? I thought Windows mobile has an native API that allows pretty much everything, whereas Android exposes only a sandboxed Java environment.

... and not sexy

Agreed...

Re:Stupid

[jittles]

Not true, I get on the command line of my iPhone all the time. There's nothing like being able to SSH into a machine from anywhere you've got reception. Its got nice little touch gestures for different command short cuts and everything.

Re:Stupid

[Neil Watson]

Maemo, found on the Nokia N900, is Debian based. It's most likely that installing apps on a Maemo device will involve a simple 'apt-get install '.

Re:Wait... how?

[Anonymous Coward]

After having dealt with various incarnations of VxWorks over the past four years... Massive step backwards. VxWorks is lighter weight than Linux, but a massive leap backwards in terms of networking features and performance. (Remember, VxWorks was chosen over Linux for recent Linksys WRT54G units for cost reasons on the order of $2-5/unit and not overall performance- Units were cheaper to make, but in my experience far less reliable than the older Linux-based units with double the RAM/ROM.)

VxWorks 5.x's networking stack is basically the 1990ish BSD Reno stack, with no new features but a lot of new weird bugs, for example. At least its deficiencies keep me employed.

Re:Wait... how?

[GooberToo]

and a substantially more "orthodox" Linux than android

I have no idea where people get their misinformation from, but that statement is completely false!

Android runs a standard Linux kernel, which is to say, Android is "orthodox" Linux. On Android, the differences are above the "Linux" level. They have their own framework known as Android. To say Android is unorthodox is to say KDE and Gnome are unorthodox Linux, which is of course crazy talk.

Re:Wait... how?

[savuporo]

Most Linuxes are GNU/Linux, including such things as a standard libc. Android uses its own. Meh ? There is a multitude of libc's out there, GLIBC is not the only one. Look up EGLIBC ( debian standard now ) , uClibc, standard on uClinux distros, dietlibc, newlib. The fact that Android uses a BSD-derived Bionic C library for core userspace, does not make the system any less "Linux". Functionally, a lot of linux systems dont ship X, and dont ship loads of other userspace libraries that you may think are "orthodox". Lots of linux systems use busybox for almost all userspace functionality.