Mobile operating systems are not commodities

An interesting article has appeared on the Symbian website refuting the often stated claim that mobile phone operating systems are a commodity and it doesn’t matter which OS they run. Linux phones come under fire for not being all the things people make them out to be, it’s easy to forget that Linux is only a kernel and it’s not particularly mobile focused. Mobile phones and other portable devices have to be optimised for low power usage in order to create viable products but power usage isn’t really an issue on a mains powered computer and even laptops still have fairly large powerful batteries which you simply don’t find in many portable devices. Because Linux is primarily a personal computer based kernel and will cater more for performance needs it is less likely to incorporate changes that will reduce power consumption at the price of performance.

The other significant point of the article is that the kernel is only 10% of the OS, the rest of which is made up of a very large stack of applications, middleware and other infrastructure. In the case of Linux phones much of that might be proprietary and not open source in any way, it also shows that core of the OS is only a small part of the picture. All in all it’s a well thought out article that despite coming from Symbian itself it lays out a well justified argument that the OS is very relevant in the mobile arena.

http://www.symbian.com/symbianos/insight/insight7.html