Why Open OSes take so much the light compared to RTOS? One explaination could be there is a market outside of the phone makers to make money around those devices.

The only ways to make money around RTOSes is either to sell services to phone maker or licence some technology to the same phone maker.

On open OSes, you can sell to end user applications and services.

You will argue you can do the same with J2ME apps, it true and in some extent this open the platform and rejoin the second point.

There is regularly a lot of noise around RTOS based phones, but as the phone doesn’t get any addition after being launch, the noise decline after.

On some extent, you can notice some analogy in Smartphone world. As soon as something appear on Apple’s iPhone, you see it all over the web, even if the same feature/apps already exist for years on feature phone or other smartphone platform.

Good clarification on Nokia S40 and Qualcomm. I only made reference to commercially available RTOS in the post.

I think Qualcomm’s platform is an interesting one to watch in particular and may become used more and more as their 3G business is doing well.

I’ve tried to base my comments on the application OS trends, but you are correct in saying that and RTOS can also appear in a Open OS phone.

Best, Ben

In general I agree with the notion that in the current industry buzz, platforms that are not considered “Open OS” are overlooked and under appreciated.

However, I would add a few clarifications to this piece:

1. While OSE and Nucleus are 3rd party licensed RTOSs, the biggest RTOS platform currently is Nokia OS powering Series 40 (and 30) which might ship over 300M per annum.. as far as I know NOS/S40/30 is not based on some external RTOS but on internal Nokia, but I might be wrong?

2. Another platform people always tend to forget is Qualcomm REX/AMSS/BREW, which powers hundreds of millions of phones around the world. Technically, BREW has Open OS capabilities but most people classify Qcom and/or BREW as a Feature Phone platform. It is also difficult to count since different customers use the platform in varying levels, so there are hybrids

3. One must remember that sometimes licensed RTOSs will ship in Dual CPU phones and will power the baseband CPU, but another OS (typically an Open OS) will power the Application CPU. From the RTOS vendor perspective, its a shipment that counts, but in considering the market shares and the Feature Phone vs Smartphone battle, what counts is the Application OS, so such phones will be counted based on their Application OS, even if there is an RTOS on the modem

I think things are going to depend on how high and long the ‘hump’ of mass productisation of the new OS is. We’ve seen in the past when OEM’s build their first devices with a new OS (e.g. S60) the first devices take a long time. The position people want to get to is producing new devices easily and quickly – in essence they compete on ‘excellence of execution’. I believe this is one of the reasons Symbian will struggle. Why compete with Nokia on excellence of execution on Symbian? With Android, HTC have a lead right now.

So in 3 years, who knows. Even though the hardware will come down in price in order to support open OS’ at lower price points there is no certainty this will translate to open OS phones at more price points.

An example sprang to mind the other day. I saw an advert for the Samsung Jet which I think has an 800MHz apps processor. Samsung are advertising it as the ‘fastest’ phone. Of course it runs Samsung’s internal OS.

3 years ago we would have expected an 800MHz apps processor phone to be running an open OS for sure…

I think the public’s perception of post-load applications and what they want from them is going to be the key.

I ‘ll try to offer an analyst perspective. We regularly gather data on mass volume shipments of mobile software products as part of our 100 million club (.com). Based on that research, Nucleus and OSE are deployed on 1.61B and 1.45B phones respectively (on baseband or app processors). VxWorks is edging towards the 100m installs, but is not there yet (which is why they are not on our watchlist yet).

Everything else AFAIK (incl. LG and Samsung’s in-house RTOSes) is not licensable. Would be interested to know if you are aware of any other players in the RTOS market with high volume shipments.

Andreas

How do you think the market will look in 3 years? Moore’s law, as well as the pull for “open innovation” environments drives the market to higher end and smartphones at the moment.