Intel announces Moblin 2.1 for phones
By Nilay Patel 
posted Sep 22nd 2009 12:48PM
posted Sep 22nd 2009 12:48PM
posted Sep 22nd 2009 12:48PM
Number of applications downloaded from the iPhone App Store
After hitting a historic 1 billion downloads, Apple says the store cleared another half a billion apps in the following three months.
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Check out the demos here: http://tinyurl.com/l4nssn & http://tinyurl.com/lus7fq. This could give Nokia’s Maemo a serious run for its money.
For about 15 seconds before the fan kicks in and 15 more minutes before the battery runs out? ;)
Seriously though, as the CPUs get more power efficient, at some point wireless networks and display probably become the biggest power hogs and Intel will be in a much stronger position.
It will all depend on how the hardware turns out to be and how friendly and cool the UI.
Moreover the N900 will hit the streets next month and this Moblin thing?
@zel, If you want the CPU to fall out of the energy equation, you have to stop making it better for many years, so that you get the same computation power for less energy. What chip companies normally do is offer ever-greater computation power at about the same energy draw. Or slightly more energy draw as batteries slowly improve.
If a device had the CPU power of a 10-year-old mobile phone fabbed in today's process, the phone would be cheap but not powerful - it couldn't drive a large touchscreen, run a real OS, etc. This sort of product does exist, sold as a $30 pay-as-you-go phone in the drugstore. Maybe ten years from now we'll have $30 iPhones in the drugstore and they'll be considered cheap junk because for $200 you'll get a phone with 100 times the processing power, 1080p video capability and 100Mbps connection.
Regarding time-to-market it is a fair comment that Maemo has a significant advantage over Moblin but it is impossible to ignore Intel's asipirations in the mobile space. It is working hard to drive better power efficiency on its products designed for mobile devices. These products could be attractive to companies looking to compete with Maemo and this could see Moblin getting more momentum in late 2010 and beyond.
Alternatively you can look at it differently. Intel and Nokia now have a partnership agreement. They are working together on many common open source elements that affect both Moblin and Maemo. If I understand correctly Nokia is also going to license some of its relevant intellectual property to Intel to help it add comms capabilities to its products.
Further convergence between Moblin and Maemo cannot be ruled out - it was even suggested they could merge in a recent Reuters article.
@benwood (twitter)
Sounds like Intel is pushing into MIDs because they're halfway between a netbook and a mobile phone. They're trying to creep closer to phones by nibbling at the edge of the high end. Presumably they hope that some users will skip the iPhone and go for something bigger and more powerful, a small tablet PC that can make phone calls. Then as the chips shrink they'll migrate down to smartphones.
That might be Intel's plan, but in reality it's more like they're setting up MIDs as a buffer zone between notebooks and smartphones. Intel's real nightmare would be if the lowest end of the netbook market started deciding Android or Ubuntu on ARM was good enough for web and email. From there, Moore's Law would be working against them, as ARM chips would keep getting better and moving up from a tiny segment at the bottom of the food chain to higher and higher segments.