Running Windows Mobile Or Linux On Your S60 Handset?
Some 20 months ago, when I was still a beginning blogger, I wondered why I couldn’t run Windows Mobile or Palm OS on my Nokia 3250. I didn’t want to make them my main OS, I just wanted the choice of running them whenever I wanted to, especially to benefit from the hundreds of medical apps that both platforms offered. A few months later, I plunged down and got a Qtek 9100, a Windows Mobile 5 device. For the whole 9 months that I owned this handset, it was a love and hate relationship. It allowed me to tweak and personalize my handset to extents S60 can only dream of, but it crashed and froze so often that the only day I relunctantly put my SIM card in it was the one day my Nokia 3250’s battery died on me. I summed up my thoughts about S60 and Windows Mobile in 2 posts: 10 things S60 should learn from WM and 10 things WM should learn from S60, and eventually gave up on Windows Mobile as a whole. I still follow the news about the platform and would definitely like to give WM7 a go whenever Microsoft thinks it’s high time to release it.
But this Monday, a surprising news found its way into my RSS: ZDnet had a post about VMware announcing it’s Mobile Virtualization Platform, a platform that would allow for an operating system to run efficiently without any hardware constraints. It’s supposed to make it easier and faster for handset vendors to develop their software and services. But one sentence just started blinking in red in front of me when I read it:
Sjostedt also suggested that MVP would make it possible for various mobile operating systems, such as Symbian, varieties of Linux and Windows Mobile, to “co-exist on the handset as well”.
This is when it hit me: VMware actually make a Fusion application for Mac computers that allow them to run Windows Mobile in parallel to Mac OS. Oh! So let me get this straight, there is a chance that one day, we could run Windows Mobile, Linux and S60 on the same handset? I mean English is only my 3rd language, but I know what “co-exist” is.
I don’t know how close we are to this, I don’t know if the VMware platform should be installed by the device manufacturer (would Nokia agree to put it then?) or could be installed as a 3rd-party app pretty much like VMware fusion on the Mac, I also don’t know how practical it would be to have Windows Mobile running on a ~300Mhz CPU from Nokia. What I know is that Styletap brought me one step closer to realizing my old request of having another platform on my S60 devices.
But it’s definitely the “Linux” part of Sjostedt’s sentence that is most intriguing me. I hear Android bells in my ears. Android and S60 on the same handset? I believe I’m delirius. You can read more about Mobile Virtualization Platform on VMware’s official website. What do you think?
James @ Nokia Creative
http://www.n95users.com/forum/lounge...le-phones.html'
Im quite surprised that not many members have left their feedback on it to be honest.