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Symbian: Linux unfit for mobile phones (the Register)
The Register
notes some negative comments by Symbian's Jerry Panagrossi concerning
Linux on mobile phones.
""Theres been a lot of misleading information over the years...about the fitness of Linux for the mobile space," Jerry Panagrossi, vp of Symbian's North American operations, told industry insiders this morning at the GigaOM:Mobilize conference in San Francisco.
"There has been wonderful work, fantastic work in the Linux community in the workstation and PC space, but when you drag that over into the mobile space, there is an entirely different domain with a different set of challenges that handset managers must overcome."
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Symbian: Linux unfit for mobile phones (the Register) Posted Sep 18, 2008 23:26 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] "You quickly gravitate towards a proprietary implementation, as you add an underling [sic] device driver model [and] you add an application execution environment."Yep, definitely knows what he's talking about.
Symbian isn't going to get this very easily Posted Sep 19, 2008 22:27 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link] Symbian has four different GUIs. Pretty much every phone has its own load of their OS. They have a big fragmentation problem. At least with Open Source, especially when you're talking about the GPL pieces, it's possible to merge the good work into the main thread without getting a signature.Symbian's main problem as they transition to Open Source seems to be that they haven't figured out what is differentiating about their system and what isn't. I am still having a lot of trouble believing that their kernel is differentiating - in the face of Linux - and thus worthy of continued large investements. Haven't they watched Sun's efforts to win market share with Solaris? Solaris is a fine system, it just isn't that differentiating for Sun any longer. Customers don't care whether it's there or not. Developers sometimes do, but not enough to make their market. Anyway, they don't make friends in the Open Source world by bad-mouthing other projects. They should know better. Bruce
Symbian isn't going to get this very easily Posted Sep 20, 2008 21:59 UTC (Sat) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] Bruce,Surely Symbian has a lot of advantages to any other smartphone OS that derive from it being used for so long to actually ship phones. To my knowledge it has a clear edge in using less memory, less battery, lesser CPU's... all those things that really mean anything in creating phones. For instance the OLPC project clearly showed, that there is a lot of work for Linux (including user-space) in this area. Also Symbian v9 comes with the "Platform Security" architecture, which you mostly see as the need to sign binaries in order to be able to distribute and install. (And yes, Free Software community may not see the last issue as a positive feature, but many might, and whatever you think of it, at least it is a *different* feature.) Also just in general, Symbian is the most popular smartphone OS by a big margin, even if being located in the US makes it easy to forget or never know that fact. So paying attention to Symbian becoming Open Source is very interesting indeed, not at all like Solaris which I agree was becoming quite irrelevant until it was Open Sourced. But Symbian's challenges are also well known. It is not the simplest environment to develop on, and now the know-how is becoming even more Nokia centered than before, so they don't have much of a community to boot. And as a symptom of this... where are the applications? If the iPhone could get hundreds (or thousands?) of apps in less than a year, why couldn't Symbian? Anyway, they don't make friends in the Open Source world by bad-mouthing other projects. They should know better. Totally agree. Especially since there have been Linux based smartphones for years now, with dozens of models shipped. Clearly you can do a Linux based mobile phone. In fact, a reason Linux is preferred a lot in Asia: no touch screen support in Symbian yet! So despite all my ranting above, Symbian is not at all a sure winner yet, but they are starting in pole position still.
Symbian isn't going to get this very easily Posted Sep 21, 2008 4:24 UTC (Sun) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link] If you talk with an existing Symbian developer, the security system is the first thing they complain about. Whether or not the Free Software community or the cellular carrier likes it, it's square in the way of getting those thousand applications that might make or break their market.Yes, Linux needs power management work, especially in the area of having powered-down sections of memory while the system keeps working. We're going to get that work, though. What is it going to cost Symbian to do their missing pieces? Their costs are much higher than ours because they have to do all the work. And it's this same song all over whenever there's a feature to be done. I think they need to concentrate on the part of their system that the customer sees. There's little business differentiation below that level. That's way above the kernel, and a lot of it is S60, not Symbian. Bruce
Symbian: Linux unfit for mobile phones (the Register) Posted Sep 18, 2008 23:30 UTC (Thu) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]
The Symbian consortum managed to splinter SymbianOS into incompatible platforms all by itself, which has only been corrected by Nokia finally buying out its remaining partners. And the use of C++ classes in the OS API practically guarantees that they will break binary compatibility again.
As for resource-efficiency - SymbianOS was highly optimised for its platform, but that was a Psion PDA with a few megs of battery-backed RAM storage, not a mobile phone with hundreds of megs of flash storage. You can't execute-in-place from cheap flash storage, which made it very slow to start programs and to boot, though I understand it does now implement demand paging.
Symbian: Linux unfit for mobile phones (the Register) Posted Sep 19, 2008 12:23 UTC (Fri) by jonth (subscriber, #4008) [Link]
Not all mobile phones have "hundreds of megs of flash storage." The firmware for a basic phone typically fits in 4-8MB of flash.
Symbian: Linux unfit for mobile phones (the Register) Posted Sep 19, 2008 4:26 UTC (Fri) by teresa (guest, #39578) [Link] One hand Nokia is selling internet tablets n800, n810 and new models with features that make them more of smart mobile phone using Linux as the Operating System. Read "Nokia Linux tablets go 3G, OMAP3" at http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS9093153240.html?kc=rss And on other hand Nokia's executives say Linux is unfit for mobile! this raises an important question if the teams at Nokia know what's happening within Nokia? I think Linux is fantastic OS which can scale up to Server and and scale down to Mobile phone, there is absolutely no doubt about it. LiMo group of companies are launching or have already launched about 18 linux based mobile phones, read at http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS8355553945.html. Google's mobile phones is also based on Linux.
Symbian: Linux unfit for mobile phones (the Register) Posted Sep 19, 2008 6:25 UTC (Fri) by philipstorry (subscriber, #45926) [Link] Aww, be fair.Yes, Nokia use Linux on their internet tablet. But they have a different OS choice for their phones. Phones have different requirements to internet tablets. Stability, the ability to deal with multiple events from the network, and real-time or near-real-time reactions to those events are the main differences - the OS must allow the devices to function as a phone whenever possible, rather than as a portable computer. I suppose I should say that I'm actually pretty fond of Symbian Series 60 - I've used a number of OSes for mobile purposes, and Symbian has always been the least bug-ridden, most stable and most suitable that I've found. True, its competition boils down to Windows Mobile, Palm OS and Linux. And of those, I think that Linux is the next best option. But then, Windows Mobile is a bug-ridden hunk of crud that was designed for PDAs and hurriedly retro-fitted onto phones. And it shows, in all the wrong ways. Palm OS was a great OS for PDAs, but again hasn't really survived the transition to running on phones - it's just not able to switch fast enough when calls come in, nor is it stable enough. Linux is getting better and better at handling such things, but Nokia are right - it IS more fragmented, and its suitability will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and perhaps even from phone design to phone design. With Symbian, I can just buy a phone and feel confident that the software on it will work well. With Linux, I wouldn't feel that confident. And only a system like Google's Android, which aims to package Linux into a commonly used platform - would give me the kind of buying confidence that Symbian does. (Yes, I'm aware of the Linux systems like OpenMoko, but I've heard precious little about how good or bad they are. I'm expecting more from Google, for some silly reason...) Symbain isn't perfect, by the way. I've owned a Symbian phone on which, if I really pushed it, I could crash the GPRS data module. No more data services until a reboot. But in real life use, that would happen once a quarter at most - which, considering I never turn my phone off, is pretty impressive. And everything else continued to work, so whilst I lost GPRS service I never lost the data stored on the phone - which was nice. It occurs to me that such reliability is why I don't trust most other OSes like I trust Symbian. In fact, only in writing this have I realised how much I trust Symbian, as I just assume that the phone will work every time I pick it up. Now that's good software! Anyway, I'm getting away from the point - which is that internet tablets aren't phones. There are different requirements, in both the usage and the manufacturing. (I left out the whole manufacturing side, because I've already used up too much space here!) Nokia's criticism has validity, and if we want Linux to be successful on phones then those criticisms should be welcomed and addressed, not shunned on the spurious grounds that Nokia also uses Linux on non-phone devices. (Note: I deliberately excluded Apple's iPhone OS and RIM's Blackberry OS as they don't licence them, making a comparison pointless.)
Symbian: Linux unfit for mobile phones (the Register) Posted Sep 19, 2008 6:46 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] The underlying OS on Nokia phones (I have a N73) may be wonderful but the UI is so obtuse it borders on the intolerable. With an open, Linux-based phone like the OpenMoko Freerunner there would at least be some hope of this being fixed at some point, as itches tend to get scratched. Of course, the last thing Nokia wants is end-users being able to scratch their own itches -- Nokia's main customers, after all, aren't end-users but mobile phone service providers, who are big believers in, e.g., selling SMS messages at 19¢ a pop. They're about as likely to want to encourage end-users to install a Jabber client on their phone to send text messages for free as a turkey would be to vote for Christmas. Besides, I don't see a big difference between phones and Internet tablets. I, for one, would expect the same degree of reliability from an Internet tablet that I expect from a mobile phone, and if Linux is OK for Internet tablets I don't buy that it shouldn't be for phones.
Symbian: Linux unfit for mobile phones (the Register) Posted Sep 19, 2008 7:30 UTC (Fri) by philipstorry (subscriber, #45926) [Link]
The Series 60 interface could do with a sprucing up, but it's usable. Compared with the interface from, say, Motorola phones I've seen, it's pretty good.
It's more sensibly laid out - and better suited to a phone - than Windows Mobile is. It's nowhere near as slick as an iPhone, or even (and I never thought I'd say this!) recent Blackberries. Palm's interface was tragically PDA-ish, so let's count them out.
So yeah, their interface is definitely "just below average" as things go. There's worse, but there's much better.
Great point about who Nokia's customers are... Their UI has certainly suffered because they want to be as middle-of-the-road as possible.
As for reliability - if my internet tablet is crashing, it's not the end of the world. If my phone is crashing, I may not be able to call emergency services if I need to.
So whilst I agree with you that I want each to be as reliable and stable as the other. But the simple fact is that one matters less than the other, in a very practical sense.
Symbian: Linux unfit for mobile phones (the Register) Posted Sep 19, 2008 8:39 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] If the Nokia Series 60 UI is the best there currently is (apart from the iPhone) then I shudder to think what the others are like. I came to the N73 from a Siemens ME45 which was of course a much more basic phone but the UI made a lot more sense to me. You may be right about emergency phone calls but I think this should by no means be construed as an excuse for sloppy software on the tablets. I'm also not convinced that it is more difficult in principle to make a reliable mobile phone than it is to make a reliable Internet tablet (or high-performance firewall, or PVR, or whatever else type of appliance Linux is used for today as a matter of course, with people expecting very high reliability). It's not as if Nokia & co. had access to a special type of software voodoo that is forever beyond Linux -- the days where you had to write the code to run on your phone in very tight assembly language are long gone. They've just been at the game for a bit longer and have put a lot more money into it, they are better set up to actually doodle around with the hardware, and they have, in the mobile phone service providers, very established customers which are happy to buy up whatever new-fangled handsets they throw out, by the million. That, and their end-users are 100% prepared to deal with mediocre products because »mediocre« is all there is, and »mediocre« is, at the end of the day, still a whole lot better than »atrocious«. From what the Nokia guy said, I suspect that the mobile phone OS people at Nokia have just moved from the »First they ignore you« stage to the »Then they laugh at you« stage in the great progression of things, and we all know where that eventually leads ... :-)
Symbian: Linux unfit for mobile phones (the Register) Posted Sep 19, 2008 11:12 UTC (Fri) by philipstorry (subscriber, #45926) [Link]
I didn't say it was the best - I said it was middle of the road! Not as good as iPhone/Blackberry, better than Windows Mobile/Palm.
It's the best licensable interface out there, though. And this is a sad state of affairs, but we have to remember that Nokia need a fairly generic interface that's easily customised for different brands of mobile phone network etc.
Recent versions of Symbian have gotten better - they have an "active standby" screen instead of a flat static wallpaper, which functions much like the Blackberry home screen or the Windows Mobile "Today" type screen - alerts for new messages, current calendar entries and to-dos, etc.
But it's till not the best interface by a long shot!
As for the acceptance of mediocrity by people, and Nokia fearing Linux, I agree with you there.
:-)
Symbian: Linux unfit for mobile phones (the Register) Posted Sep 25, 2008 10:51 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
I once had a whole set of photos from Christmas that Symbian wiped from flash - when the filesystem filled up it detected some sort of error, to which it responded not by doing a filesystem check but by reformatting the filesystem... Also the PC software at the time made it non-trivial to ensure the whole state of the phone was synced, whereas Palm automatically does this with a single button press.
For all the faults of Palm OS as a phone OS, it hasn't lost any of my data due to such a basic defect.
Linux is not RT OS Posted Sep 19, 2008 5:48 UTC (Fri) by MilanKerslager (guest, #53653) [Link]
Linux is not a real RT OS, but Symbian is. More than this, Symbian has microkernel architecture and this leads to be able to be more power efficient. This is the fact. On the other side there is lack of application which are able to run on both systems.
Linux is not RT OS Posted Sep 19, 2008 7:35 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Try as I might I can't see why being a microkernel would make things more
power-efficient than otherwise. In the limit it seems to me that they'd be identically efficient.
Linux is not RT OS Posted Sep 19, 2008 8:07 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]
I would think that microkernels is more powerhungry, since each subsystem needs (expensive) context switching to do it's work on a microkernel.
(ARRRRRR)
Linux is not RT OS Posted Sep 19, 2008 11:32 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
That depends on how heavily optimized the microkernel is. With sufficient ingenuity I can foresee a situation in which the context switch only happens if the subsystem would have enough work to do to justify the context switch cost. Of course, the context switch is an additional overhead: whether there are savings to be made that would force the power consumption back down to non-microkernel levels I do not know.
But it certainy isn't open-and-shut microkernels-better yah-yah-yah as the original poster suggested!
Linux is not RT OS Posted Sep 19, 2008 18:21 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Look at the history of Linux, and Linus' comments on microkernels.
Linux is micro-kernel in design, monolithic in implementation. As such, it is highly reliable, small, and fast. Strip out what you don't need, and it'll outperform a micro-kernel for speed, design and stability.
What people miss is that what is the best solution for DESIGN is not necessarily the best solution for ENGINEERING.
Design it as if it were a micro-kernel, build it as a monolithic kernel, and (as Linux does) you can have the best of both worlds.
Cheers,
Linux is not RT OS Posted Sep 19, 2008 19:25 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link] If there is anything "micro-kernel in design" about Linux, it's hidden really well. To all appearances it is a classic monolithic kernel design.
Sorry, but this is bull-shit Posted Sep 19, 2008 19:41 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] "Classic monolithic kernel design" required recompile to add/remove hardware support. Or to add/remove new filesystem. Or support for IPv6. With Linux you can easily install new driver or even subsystem in running kernel. You can even patch the kernel itself (ksplice). This EXACTLY what microkernel proponents preach as microkernel advantages. Oh, sure they like to talk about crash-proff design and explain that bad driver can not bring the whole system down - but the fact is: real commercial microkernel OSes tend to throw this advantage out of the windows (both Windows and MacOS have modiles in the same addres space as microkernel to save on context switches) and DMA makes the whole point moot.
Yes, it most certainly is BS. Posted Sep 19, 2008 22:14 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link] All that means is that it's linked incrementally and has a hooking mechanism. There were other monolithic kernels that had those features, though perhaps not to the extent that the Linux kernel has. That's nowhere close to a microkernel.
Yes, it most certainly is BS. Posted Sep 19, 2008 23:26 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Ya... Microkernel design is all centered around having a central 'core' service that handles messaging for other programs which perform the various features that kernel needs (filesystem, network, POSIX syscalls, etc).
I've never seen any sort of message routing/passing concept for Linux. The Linux kernel is certainly very modular, but that's something else.
Linux is not RT OS Posted Sep 19, 2008 13:23 UTC (Fri) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
"More than this, Symbian has microkernel architecture and this leads to be able to be more power efficient."
Er... what?
Symbian: Linux unfit for mobile phones (the Register) Posted Sep 19, 2008 6:43 UTC (Fri) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link]
Pure sour grapes simple
Symbian: Linux unfit for mobile phones (the Register) Posted Sep 19, 2008 11:54 UTC (Fri) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]
The quote there from Jerry Panagrossi seems pretty reasonable. It's rather too bad about The Register's tradition of inflammatory headlines injecting a bit of "that old flamey feeling" into LWN.
Five million? Posted Sep 19, 2008 12:08 UTC (Fri) by dark (✭ supporter ✭, #8483) [Link] I'm more interesting in the LiMO quote than the Symbian quote. (emphasis mine)"The real question is about access to developers. Linux is a very prevalent technology. There are something like 5 million active developers, and the other technologies rely on communities that are much, much smaller."That's a remarkable claim. Does anyone know where that number came from?
As a developer, this saddens me Posted Sep 22, 2008 12:40 UTC (Mon) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link]
Right now, there are three interesting phone platforms that might hit high volume over the next two years: The iPhone, Android, and the open-source S60 (or whatever it is).
The iPhone is a jail, and Apple will refuse to sign applications for perfectly legitimate competitors. Android looks cool, but it also looks like some/most(?) vendors intend to Tivoize the entire Linux stack and only let me load Java.
I was hoping to see a reasonable play by Nokia and Symbian with the new open source S60 (or whatever it is). S60 looks like a nice platform, and I rather like Nokia's phones.
But if Nokia's people are going to take this insulting attitude towards the open source community, it tells me that they're still thrashing around and annoying potential developers. And _that_ suggests to me that I can expect a Sun-like schizophrenia on their open source projects, and not an IBM-like professional commitment.
As somebody looking to develop cell phone software on either Android or S60, this makes me sad.
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