MontaVista Software unleashed a new embedded operating system designed to make smartphone players like Microsoft and Symbian sit up and take note.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Linux vendor, known for its embedded Linux offerings, announced its Mobilinux 4.0 product designed for the $300 and $600 mobile and wireless device market. The operating system is scheduled to ship in the second quarter of 2005 and immediately benefit MontaVista's partners such as Openwave and palmOne as well as Motorola, NEC and Panasonic.

The announcement also dovetails with MontaVista's Mobilinux Open Framework program, which it released in February 2005.

The platform is based on the Linux 2.6 kernel, and updated with Eclipse 3.0.1 and CDT 2.1 technology as well as open KDrive (aka TinyX) and GTK technologies.

Mobilinux carries a version 4.0 moniker to differentiate it from MontaVista's three other products: Consumer Electronics Edition, Professional Edition, and Carrier-Grade Edition. The new operating system features a fast start-up (less than 1 second), a small footprint, and better performance while extending battery life. The operating system also features support for RFID, (define) Bluetooth, and SAMBA (define).

Peder Ulander, MontaVista vice president of marketing, said the company is also working with handset manufacturers and mobile operators on making sure their specifications are met through open and industry standard technologies.

"Where we are sitting is in an opportunity where Linux can scale while Microsoft and Symbian are rigid and closed opportunities," Ulander told internetnews.com. "Our greatest competitor is still Roll-Your-Own but those platforms have inconsistent drive patches and upgrades especially for the larger customers. We are also seeing really high growth opportunities for Mobilinux as this push towards 3G increases and the volumes reflect it."

Overall trends in the mobile and wireless space are favorable for smartphones, according to Ulander. MontaVista's stats suggest that in the 2007 - 2008 period more than a billion intelligent smartphones will have shipped.

MontaVista's other advantage over Microsoft and Symbian is that smartphones by nature are expensive because they have two operating systems and two chips.

"A feature phone that has one operating system and one chip will make is more affordable," Ulander said.

A Symbian smartphone is really complex, Ulander said, because of all of these filters, not to mention it is 50 percent owned by Nokia, which could alarm some people looking for an open system. The other concern by handset makers, Ulander said, is that they saw what Microsoft did on the PC and they do not want to recreate that on the smartphone.

Avoiding the pitfalls of its competitors, MontaVista has also added support for a cross-platform DPM Library, an event broker to help define, publish and subscribe to content, and advanced real-time support.

Mobilinux will also have various power performance enhancements, ARM Embedded Application Binary support for compatibility with standard third-party tools, compiler support for thumb mode, and an integrated graphical layer for user interfaces.

Another strong play of MontaVista, Ulander said is in the company's contract work within the network infrastructure. Currently MontaVista has 11 different phone designs and 2.5 million handsets in the world.

Palm Linux - A MontaVista Alternative?
Linux is also in the cards for PalmSource.

The Palm OS provider made a major commitment to open source late last year with the acquisition of China Mobile Soft (CMS) and its mobile handset Linux platform. PalmSource plans to leverage Linux to strengthen Palm's position in the smartphone market.

The Palm OS is the most popular smartphone platform in the U.S.; mostly due to palmOne's Treo series of communicators. Palm barely dents the worldwide marketplace, however. Symbian dominates nearly everywhere else with Microsoft a distant second.

PalmSource plans to create a version of Palm OS Cobalt, the next-generation Palm platform, based on CMS Linux. A PalmSource representative told us at CTIA Wireless last month that supporting Linux is a strategic move on the part of the company.

That’s because many handset vendors, carriers—principally outside of the U.S—and even the Chinese government are exploring how Linux can help improve business.

The Palm OS developer is so committed, it appears the Linux edition of Cobalt may become the standard version of the Palm platform moving forward. Palm OS Linux would be capable of running standard Palm applications through an emulation layer.

PalmSource would not force licensees to use Palm OS Linux, however. The platform developer would continue to support the "regular" version of the Palm OS in parallel to the Linux edition.

Joins Club
The Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) recently accepted PalmSource as a member last month as well. CELF is an open standards-based consortium that encourages the adoption of Linux for the development of consumer electronics devices.

There are 49 other CELF members, including founders Matsushita, Sony, Hitachi, NEC, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sharp, and Toshiba besides PalmSource.