Linux Working in Mobile Devices

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Female: Let’s get ourselves connected. Female2: Got to get yourself connected. Mike: Well Linux has long made in road into the computer world, but now it’s going into the mobile world, to help us understand what the future lies with that, we have Jack Kapica from the Globe and Mail, thanks for joining us, Jack. Jack: Thank you Mike. Mike: So what are you seeing here, Linux are becoming more prevalent in mobile devices, cellphones, data devices. Jack: It very much will be, know Google’s planning on a telephone as well, and that’s going to be a Linux based phone, but they’re apparently quite away from developing or releasing a working model, much more, much closer to now, however, is another cellphone from a company called Openmoko, great name, aint it, M-O-K-O, attach to the word open. What they’re coming out with is a phone called the Neo Free Runner, neo as in N-E-O, I mean all this reference to the old matrix movie, right, but, that runs not only on the open source Linux system, but also, guess what, they’ve just put the actual case of the cellphone, as open source as well. So what happens is you could just download the specs for the case as a computer aided design file, inhaled it to your own computer aided design computer program on your machine, redesign the phone and then ship the new design off to some company with a 3D printer that will sit there and hack it out, I mean, it’s not something that every you and I would want to do, it would be far more expensive, too expensive for us to do, but what will happen is that if you’re a large corporation, you wanna have specially designed handset just for you and your employees, then it might be worth it. Mike: Well it’s interesting, because, the teleco’s really have a tight hold on what type of phones go on to their network and I’m just wondering how much are they going to lose in that over the next couple of years. Jack: Well I think it’s a big question, I think it’s going to have to fall apart at some point that their control is gonna let go. Now, what’s happening is that the reason that I find the Openmoko quite interesting is because and of course the G phone, is that we’ve had a situation now in which the, the handset manufacturers, people like Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorola and so on, what they do is they design phones that are demanded by, or features that are demanded by the various different cellphone operations, so if Roger’s calls up these guys, said, well, we think we can sell X,Y and Z features, so why don’t you put them on a cellphone and then Nokia, LG, whoever it is will then stuff them into the phone, this is a, you know, whose wagging whom here, the tail or the dog, it’s a classic question. But they can do this, you see, and this is the way it’s happening, so you’re not getting the actual manufacturers driving the market or caching up with the market, what they’re doing they’re market is the people that they sell to, the people to are Rogers, and Bell mobility and AT&T and sprint and all the rest of the companies. And eventually at some point, someone’s gonna have to move in and break that. Now the Openmoko phone is actually GSM phone, which means you get a little sim card that you stuff into it, just like you get from any Rogers telephone, and all you do, buy from Rogers is an account and you supply your own phone with you, but, that is where the big thing is gonna happen, so if Rogers can no longer, Bell or whoever, is no longer gonna be able to force your phone down your throat, they’ll have to deal with you as a separate customer. Mike: Well Jack, I wanna thank you joining us today. Jack: Thank you Mike. Mike: Jack Kapica from the Globe and Mail, you can check out more of Jack at globetechnology.com