Mobile Phone Linux

What would be nicer than a mobile phone with Linux system? Well there are available some phones with Linux but they're certainly not mainstream. New Mobile Linux Iniative (MLI) and Linux Mobile Standards Forum (LiPS) are going to change this. We're about to see the first mainstream Linux phone in near future.

For example MLI is focusing technically on fast booting, small memory footprint, power management, security and multimedia. Sound nice, but what are really the technical details? Does it say what components to use or does it allow manufacturer to choose the components? Does it require compability between the devices, are they building a new platform or just best practices? I tried also find out more about LiPS, but got nothing but high level non-technical talk. They mentions LiPS API and SDKs but nothing more about them. Let's assume they're allowing the basic solutions to be changeable and their API extended with POSIX and other standards provides a common platform. Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?

As I don't know any details about LiPS API we can assume it has some multimedia and phone APIs included. You could make an application which calls some function to send a SMS message and it works on another phone just by recompiling it. Nice. But wait a minute, how about the user interface? Can we standardize it or does they say you must use for example GTK+ or Qt to build your UI. Id like to see GTK+ based phones, some other prefers Qt. Unfortunately I'm sure they must choose between these two if they want easily portable applications. Or do they want it? Something makes me think they do.

From my point of view GTK+ is a better choice than Qt. There's many things that makes me think like that. First of all: licensing. GTK+ has LGPL which allows linking against closed source. Qt is GPL and requires that application which uses Qt must be also licensed under GPL (known as the viral effect). If you want closed source Qt application, you must buy a license from Trolltech. Secondly one little thing: Qt is C++ and can't be easily used on C apps without a wrapper. GTK+ is C and can be used in C++, there's also gtkmm which is interface for C++. Third: there's lot of GTK applications ready to be ported on GTK phone, see Maemo for a good example. Unfortunately I'm not the one who makes the decicions, but you might be one so choose wisely.