VoIP clients on mobile handsets are just starting to happen. At the same time, Linux is becoming an interesting mobile platform. The problem is, Linux is quite fragmented: Android, LiMo, Qtopia are just a few of the many flavors of the popular freely available open source OS.
This is not just a fragmentation of distributions, which is the case today for the desktop and enterprise Linux markets, but rather a fragmentation of user interface (UI) frameworks.
The mobile UI
UIs play a very important role on mobile handsets – people have gotten used to having a strict and streamlined UI on their handsets. People assume they can gain access to the phone’s address book and its functions from anywhere on the phone.
On the architectural side, the “operating system” of a mobile handset is tightly coupled with the display, the peripherals and the phone’s applications. Take a typical camera application of the phone – one of a most popular functions in any of today’s cellphones. It requires a high degree of integration:
- It requires interaction with the camera optics peripheral itself and the display to show the picture.
- You can use the picture as the background of the display, which links this application to the desktop.
- You can send the picture to a friend, which links this to the modem or the email application and to the address book.
- You can save the picture to the picture gallery.
- You can shoot a video instead of a picture.
- You might be able to dial a video call or a video share call from the camera application itself.
What it all means
Writing an integrated application for a mobile handset depends a lot on the UI model used by the handset.
A VoIP Client should be a tightly integrated application – it should be able to access the address book and call history, it should have access to peripherals, it should be able to take control over the modem and even replace existing interfaces (hijacking GSM calls and routing them through VoIP for example).
Back to Linux…
Linux distributions for mobile handsets will vary in the UI model they provide. This variance is what makes them difficult to work with. If you’re in the business of building applications for handsets, then using two different Linux handsets that use different models (Qtopia versus LiMo) means you need to develop the UI twice from the ground up.
- On Windows Mobile this is not the case. You simply use Microsoft Phone Canvas technology and tweak it between phones.
- For Symbian you have a similar variation between S40, S60 and UIQ.
- On Linux – depending on the various distributions… And now with the new Android OS out there, there is no telling if this will cause a reduction in the number of distributions or rather an increase.
Tags: Android OS, Clients, handsets, Linux, Mobile, Open source, Operating system, Symbian, user interface, video, Video Share, VoIP client, Windows Mobile
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