(keitai-l) Re: Embedded Linux Vs Symbian Vs T-Engine

From: Neil Hopcroft <neil-keitai_at_hopcroft.org.uk>
Date: 09/14/04
Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.0.20040914180658.0242fa58@pop3.demon.co.uk>
Hi,

(before answering this question, I must declare a bias, I'm primarily a 
developer of Symbian applications)

>Dear Group members,
>
>These days many cell phone manufacturers are shifting their focus to
>embedded linux, which is easy to customize as per the requirement and is
>royalty free. What benefit symbian can provide to the OEMs or to normal user
>over the linux.

There are several technical benefits, and some drawbacks (and something 
which looks like a drawback which is actually a benefit):

* Symbian OS was designed for small devices and has been developed with 
such devices in mind for its entire life.
* Symbian exception (and general error) handling is considerably more 
consistent than Linux (incidentally this is something Win32 scores well on too)
* Symbian is based around a microkernel, which gives it a much more modular 
construction
* Linux has a much broader developer base
* Linux therefore has much more software available (however, much of this 
software isn't developed with the idea of small devices in mind, so much of 
the software is problematic to run in devices without practically infinite 
memory resources)
* Symbian is much more available in the phone market, its a real product 
really being used by real people (and, therefore, has experience making it 
work)
* Symbian licence fee is not huge, when compared with differences in 
development costs
* Type Approval of SymbianOS based phones can follow precedent
* Symbian is much better at maintaining binary compatibility between 
versions (its not perfect but you wouldn't expect anything linux to work 
without recompiling when moving from one version to another) - applications 
built for S60 v1.0 mostly still work on v2.1.

Neil
Received on Tue Sep 14 20:25:58 2004