Cell Phones: Don't Count Linux Out (Business Week) [LWN.net]

Cell Phones: Don't Count Linux Out (Business Week)

Posted Sep 1, 2004 14:22 UTC (Wed) by pyellman (guest, #4997)
Parent article: Cell Phones: Don't Count Linux Out (Business Week)

So far, Linux phones haven't lived up to the hype......

.... only 1.1 million Linux-based phones are expected to ship this year, vs. 14 million using Symbian system ....

Reminds me of a recent story in my hometown newspaper, headlined "Crime rates remain steady" which, in it's body, went on to detail how crime had gone up (versus the previous year) in virtually every category.

Peter Yellman

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No, it is accurate

Posted Sep 1, 2004 14:39 UTC (Wed) by jonth (subscriber, #4008) [Link]

The annual mobile phone market is approx 400m units a year. I think we can say 1.1m counts as "not living up to the hype".

Linux is just too big and clunky for the very cost sensitive "vanilla" phone market - the majority of phones in this market use very small realtime operating systems like Nucleus (total footprint 20KB or so) to keep ROM usage down to a minimum. These devices also need hard real-time latencies, of which Linux is not really capable.

Where Linux can compete is in the smartphone arena, where much more flash memory is available, guaranteed latency is not relevant, and you need the rich feature set of a general purpose OS like Linux, Windows or Symbian.

Jonth

No, it is accurate

Posted Sep 1, 2004 15:40 UTC (Wed) by gallir (subscriber, #5735) [Link]

Why hard realtime is needed for small phones but not needed for smart
(complex) ones? Hard to understand.

No, it is accurate

Posted Sep 1, 2004 15:58 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Of course it's needed for the complex ones. It's just that with a $400 phone, you can afford to add a dedicated subsystem to handle the realtime tasks. With a $20 phone you can't.

No, it is accurate

Posted Sep 2, 2004 12:13 UTC (Thu) by jonth (subscriber, #4008) [Link]

Correct. Most "Smartphones" have at least two main CPUs, often referred to as the modem processor and the applications processor. (I'm ignoring any DSPs here).

The modem processor contains the physical layer and the protocol stack, with a simple driver interface (often just an AT interface). This processor almost always runs a pure RTOS, and will be a very low power device with a small memory footprint (a few 100KB RAM and 1-4MB Flash) and not much grunt (10s of MIPs).

The applications processor then looks after the user facing stuff. This runs Windows/PalmOS/Linux - or whatever, and is usually much more grunty (100s of MIPs) with oodles of RAM (10s of MB) and Flash (10-100s of MB).

In a "Vanilla" phone, the applications processor is dropped and a simple UI is put on top of the protocol stack on the modem processor, so this processor can usually drive a small keyboard and display.

cheers,

Jonth

No, it is accurate

Posted Sep 1, 2004 16:19 UTC (Wed) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888) [Link]

The annual mobile phone market is approx 400m units a year.

Source of that number, please?

I seriously doubt that about 1/12 of the world's entire population, including infants, third worlders, etc, buy and replace a mobile phone every year. I might believe that the total installed base of mobile phones is 400m, although that still sounds on the high side. I won't believe that everyone replaces said phone every year.

Actually, 400 M this year is a little low

Posted Sep 1, 2004 17:10 UTC (Wed) by gilb (subscriber, #11728) [Link]

Electronic News, Setpember 1, 2004:

"According to the firm (IDC), worldwide mobile phone shipments decreased sequentially by 5.9 percent in the March quarter and increased by 29.3 percent year-over-year to 152.7 million units. Additionally, the nascent market for converged mobile devices, or smartphones, posted a sequential decrease of 5.5 percent but a striking year-over-year increase of 85.8 percent."

<snip>

"With 1.5 billion wireless subscribers expected by the end of the year, IDC expects the worldwide mobile phone market to surpass 595 million units shipped in 2004. Through 2008, the market will continue to expand until it reaches nearly an all-replacement sales scenario toward the end of the decade with more than 800 million mobile phones shipping annually.

Broken down, IDC said that sales of 2.5G mobile phones will drive market growth for the next several years with sales of 3G mobile phones finally surpassing the 100 million annual unit mark in 2007. The converged mobile device market, surpassing 20 million units shipped worldwide in 2004, will be dominated throughout the decade by Symbian-powered devices -- Microsoft and PalmSource are expected to mount a long-term challenge, but will have greater difficulty gaining exposure to mainstream mobile phone market volume, IDC reported."

http://www.reed-electronics.com/electronicnews/article/CA...

Yes, it is an insanely large number. It is why semiconductor vendors start breathing hard anytime a cell phone manufacturer shows up.

Actually, 400 M this year is a little low

Posted Sep 1, 2004 20:55 UTC (Wed) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888) [Link]

Yes, it is an insanely large number.

No kidding. I rather suspect that some breathless analysts or vendors have done some ridiculous extrapolation of some transient exponential growth, rather than looking at the reality of the physical limits of the market.

Unless, of course, we're looking at disposable (or almost so) phones. Not completely out of the question, I suppose.

Actually, 400 M this year is a little low

Posted Sep 1, 2004 21:34 UTC (Wed) by gilb (subscriber, #11728) [Link]

Sorry that didn't come across as I intended. The 600 M handsets for 2004 is not unreasonable estimate, after all they did 157 M in the first quarter, which is clearly on pace for 600 M this year.

The stats are (from Gartner):
2001 - 407M
2002 - 432M
2003 - 520M

(Note that 2001 was a very bad year, it was the first year that sales didn't increase year over year. It had been averaging 60% CAGR.)

The above are all "actual" numbers, not predictions. The analysts have to estimate the numbers sold, but the are accurate to probably +/-5%.

These sort of predictions for the next year are taken pretty seriously by the suppliers and vendors, so the analysts don't do the usual "hockey-stick" approach to predicting volumes.

600M of any complete product is an insanely big number and yet the cell phone manufacturers will likely hit it this year. (PCs, including laptops are about 150 M/year, cars worldwide are around 40-50M/yr).

No, it is accurate

Posted Sep 2, 2004 12:03 UTC (Thu) by jonth (subscriber, #4008) [Link]

Believe it.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/28/2004_mobile_phone...

In terms of populations, Europe has the highest mobile phone usage in the world, with something like 60-70% of the population owning a phone. Many of these people will change their phone every year - the contract usually heavily subsidises the phone so it becomes very cheap, and in many cases, free. Many operators also offer a part exchange deal (I've no idea what they use the phones for). I don't have numbers for this, but I'd be surprised if the annual replacement rate was less than 50%.

So, 650m people in Europe, 60% have phones, 50% of them replace their phones: 200m phones just there. And we haven't even thought about China, the US or Japan.