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Virtualisation for phones coming soon near you..

1 replies · 2,322 views · Started 18 November 2009

One of the things that amazes me (rather than seeing 30 different applications run resident in memory) is some of the "exciting" technologies that is coming our way and scaling down from the desktop environments. I was fortunate enough to go to a VMWare conference a few weeks back and saw an upcoming VMWare product: Virtualisation for phones.

We are not talking about DosBox running on your phone - but their product will be able to load various different operating systems into your phone much like running Linux in a VM on your Windows PC (or vice versa).

VMWare was partnering with a few other vendors and they have a working Nokia N800 loaded with THREE different Virtual machines (on top of its existing OS) - S60, ANDROID and Windows Mobile.

The technology is in its infancy and here is a youtube flick of the demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFAT9RZ5OyQ

It is currently in infancy (pre-beta) and only running on the N800 - but VMWare has committed to porting this to as many platforms as possible (given the devices have enough RAM and grunt to run it). So the N900 will probably be one of the firs platforms to deliver this technology and apparently moving to the newer iphones later. They are also committed to getting as many guest systems available as possible to run this.

VMWare propaganda here:
http://www.vmware.com/products/mobile/index.html

Yes... Its not really a "N97" section post - but thought might share it since I personally believe it is much more exciting than seeing people compare the N97 to run 30 apps in memory.

I think the advances in cloud computing look pretty exciting too... and coupled with wireless data transfer rates could give your phone the power of a supercomputer by farming off the processor intensive tasks to the cloud then syncing the results back to your mobile device... all nice and transparent to the user...

http://www.abiresearch.com/research/1003385