Nokia and its Linux/Open-Source strategy, how be back in the game for value added services…
Thomas Menguy | October 7, 2006Linux not ready for mobile phones, Nokia exec says and this about some experiments they are working on: Nokia turns cellphones into webservers
This is pretty interesting and gave a good balance to the “all on linux” message.
At the end, what really matters are the services offered by th eplateform, and not the kernel…if you have the malloc/fopen/socket functions, do you really care if there is a linux kernel to implement the functions ? Guess no, only the services and their description are relevant, not their implementation, to digg this idea, see my post: Does mobile OS matters : no, it’s all about function. in response to this great one at Mobile Opportunity.
So nokia wants to run some “open-source” services (a browser, Apache) on their phones … and has realized that Linux is NOT mandatory to do that.
To come back to the web server article, I’ll quote the following:
[...]
- Interactive, contextual, and location-dependent content
- Use the phone as a webcam
- Find other mobile web sites in the proximity
- Find out the location of a mobile website (cellid)
- Enabling new communication means without operator involvement
- Send instant message
- Leave instant message in the inbox
- Leave a note on a mobile weblog
- Access core data
- Access favorites, contacts, calendar, logs, and messages
- Download images
- Mount a read-write view of the root webserver directory and edit pages directly using WebDAV
[...]
The second point is particularly interesting: no need of the operator nor centralized servers to create services…the phone makers are back in the game to master as much as possible user content and phone usage…For me many things can be read between the lines with this experiment, pretty exciting to say the least!
Any comments are welcomed!
