Is Linux about to displace Windows Mobile?

By Tsahi Levent-Levi

Categories: Clients

June 16th, 2008

Windows Mobile has about 12% market share in the mobile handsets market worldwide. In the past several months a trend has started to show - the strength of Windows Mobile over Linux distributions.

The migration to Linux

In the past several years, there were two main handset platforms for smart phones: Symbian and Windows Mobile. While Symbian enjoyed a large market share, Windows Mobile was starting to gain ground - especially because it was not owned by a handset vendor (Nokia owns 47.9% of Symbian). Linux was always around, but was never interesting enough. During the Asia road show I attended last month, it became obvious to me that Linux is set to displace Windows Mobile.

Handset ODM vendors are still developing and investing heavily in Windows Mobile based handsets - this can be seen by Microsoft’s expectations of 50% growth annually. On the other hand, ODMs are starting to show roadmaps based around Linux - simply because their customers, who are the handset brand vendors, are starting to look for such handsets. The reason is probably related to royalty costs of the operating system, but also to the emergence of stable mobile Linux platforms such as Android OS and LiMo.

Even Nokia, who uses Symbian in most of its handsets, has started using Linux in their N800 platform and even purchased Trolltech, who provide the well-known Qtopia platform.

What are the challenges for handset vendors moving to Linux?

The move to Linux is not an easy one. It is also a different kind of a challenge than other platforms.

• On Symbian, the challenge is usually one of learning a new way to work with an operating system which is drastically different than Windows and Linux - to the point of having (crippled) C++ API set.
• On Windows Mobile, the challenge is integrating the Phone Canvas UI technology.

For Linux the challenge is quite different - selecting the phone distribution/middleware. To date, there are several different Linux based distributions which are positioned as mobile handset ones:

• LiMo
• Google Android OS
• Trolltech Qtopia
• MontaVista Linux
• VxWorksWindRiver Linux
• More?

Each one is different in the types of services it provides “out of the box” and in the types of interfaces these services have. Android, as an example, has a Java based UI, while MontaVista comes with nothing that is handset-specific. MobileCrunch posted a good comparison between LiMo and Android - I suggest reading it.

When a handset vendor selects a distribution, this will affect his software architecture - not only for the UI but also for the multimedia system integration. This means that a handset ODM will need to select one Linux platform and stick to it for his customers - switching from LiMo to Android, for example, will require additional investment which doesn’t exist when using Windows Mobile for several customers.

This variance between distributions is going to be tricky for vendors. Those who select the wrong distribution will lose the market.