Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Trolltech provides Qt/Qtopia reference phone
Trolltech is the main independent provider of a UI and mobile application platform for Linux. Qt/Embedded is the most established product. Trolltech added Qtopia to the product suite to provide the core applications phones need.The Greenphone, as announced here, is intended for application developers, to be used for the base development of e.g. corporate mobile applications.
Yet this sounds a bit naive in my opinion:
A corporation could find it economical to develop a custom phone for say, 1,000 employees, then take the design to a contract manufacturer who would build the phone using standard hardware components according to the design, Schillings said.
It's extremely expensive to make a 1000-unit custom design. The solution for corporations is rather to rely on application platforms intended for after-market applications, like Java ME, Symbian OS and Windows Mobile. Advantages are amongst others that existing phones can be used and the cost and the development time will be much less (we are talking magnitudes here).
If on the other hand Trolltech would actually succeed with this approach, then something is seriously wrong with the existing mobile application platforms. Not that I think that will happen.
Trolltech offers fully reprogrammable mobile phone - Yahoo! News
Trolltech's Linux-based "Greenphone" for developers - Engadget Mobile
