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Free the Cell Phone! (Wired)Free the Cell Phone! (Wired)Posted Sep 29, 2005 7:09 UTC (Thu) by jonth (subscriber, #4008)In reply to: Free the Cell Phone! (Wired) by zblaxell Parent article: Free the Cell Phone! (Wired)
I'm not familiar with the Motorola-Linux phone architectures, but I'd be prepared to bet that they fit into the two-piece architecture described above.
Smartphones generally have an apps processor and a signalling processor. The signalling processor is often some strange beast with lots of bespoke DSP accelerators for Viterbi/Turbo decoding etc. These run a closed source, heavily controlled embedded signalling stack quite often with an AT interface on top. All the authentication and billing lives here and/or in the SIM. The OS on this processor is usually an RTOS of some sort, like Nucleus.
The applications processor is usually an ARM, running something like Symbian or Linux (or, perish the thought, Pocket PC). This bit runs apps that are much more suitable for open-source development, and it's not too difficult to allow these to be open source/unregulated.
J
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Free the Cell Phone! (Wired) Posted Sep 29, 2005 9:06 UTC (Thu) by nedrichards (subscriber, #23295) [Link] Except for the fact that with Symbian OS 9 they're trying to go to a one processor solution to lower the cost of the phone that's entirely right.
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