Mobile Linux, what's up?

Mobile Linux, is like a collection of flavours. Here is a presentation of the major ones and the outlook for the future.

Android

OHA, the Open Handset Alliance is a group of technology and mobile companies who have come together to accelerate mobile innovations and offer consumers a richer, less expensive, and better mobile experience. Android, an open, and free mobile platform is developed within OHA backed by Google. More than 40 devices will be available on the market during 2009.

Google’s intention to have a strong presence in the UI and application layer is questioned and alternatives such as the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL), Motoblur and other initiatives enables operators and handset vendors to keep control and achieve differentiation.

LiMo Foundation

LiMo was founded 2006 and has its strongest presence in Asia with vendors in Japan, Korea and China. Some of the world’s largest operators such as Vodafone, China Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Telefonica and DoCoMo are all members of LiMo Foundation. LiMo is a strong alternative to Android and other open mobile platforms. However, Motorola, one founder, has recently abandoned LiMo in favour of the Android platform.

Vodafone has placed LiMo and the JIL widget framework at the central of its future strategies. The Joint Innovation Lab (JIL carriers) a joint venture between Vodafone, China Mobile, Verizon Wireless and Softbank has created a widget framework that a number of handset vendors will adopt. LG, RIM, Samsung and Sharp recently announced that they will produce handsets based on this specification. JIL aims to be a ‘write once, run anywhere’ platform such as Vodafone’s recently announced 360H1 handset.

Maemo

Maemo is Nokia’s OS and currently used in the N810 internet tablet and in the N900. Maemo together with the Qt UI toolkit can be a strong player. Qt is planned to be in many platforms used by Nokia in an attempt to set Qt as the leading framework for applications. Maemo will be used in the collaboration between Intel and Nokia to target the oFono devices.

Moblin

Moblin is a Linux variant created by Intel to support the Atom processor towards the netbook, Smartphone and consumer electronics segments. Dell has declared that it will use Canonical’s remix of Mobil and Ubuntu. The Ubuntu Moblin Remix is a special version of Ubuntu that incorporates Moblin’s unique customization.

So what’s the market outlook?

Nearly one-third of the 35 million netbooks on track to ship this year will come with some variant of the free, open-source operating system, ABI Research said. The exact split is 32% Linux versus 68% Windows, said Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI, which works out to about 11 million Linux netbooks this year. So the netbook space is well penetrated and growing from a Linux standpoint.

But in the mobile handset space it is still a bit sluggish. We used to think Ubuntu was destined to lead Linux but now Google will be the first Linux vendor to become the global commodity in the handset space. Google's migration into the operating system business has been gradual, but intensive and we are now seeing almost 30 Android handsets in the market with >three million users worldwide--and about 30 more devices expected to roll out in 2010. Carolina Milanesi, Gartner research director for mobile devices, reports that Windows Mobile slipped to 7.9 percent in the third quarter of 2009. World leader Symbian also slid, from 49.7 percent to 44.6 percent. Meanwhile, BlackBerry and iPhone have grown to 20.8 percent and 17.1 percent, respectively. And in the middle of all this, Google Android has grabbed a 3.5 percent market share in the mobile handset. Not bad for a newcomer.

Linux still hasn’t lived up to the expectations stated 6 – 7 years ago when the first phone showed up. Today’s market share of 6,5% (including Android) is still very small.

Source: Canalys. 2009 unit figures calculated from reported market share.