Build upon this
Device-specific operating systems give developers and consumers room to play.
Margot Suydam, Technology Editor

For product-development teams that hope to join the party, good news: Reinventing the wheel won't be necessary. That's because the emergence of the post-PC market also heralds the emergence of an array of operating-system platforms tailored for specific device types.

The proponents of these platforms claim that they help development teams attain the touchstones of post-PC design: time to market, ease of use, small form factors, low power consumption, and high performance. And far from resulting in homogeneous designs, these platforms allow developers to concentrate on stamping a product with unique features. What's more, these software platforms turn each device into a foundation upon which developers—and consumers—can pile as-yet-nonexistent services and applications.

Phone smarts

One example of an OS fine-tuned for a specific application is the direction that Symbian is taking with the former Psion EPOC OS, which was originally intended for wireless-enabled PDAs. A joint venture launched two years ago by phone makers Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia, Symbian aims to create the standard OS for advanced mobile phones. Other partners include Matsushita (known in the US as Panasonic), and Sony and Sanyo have licensed the technology. The recently announced Ericsson R380 smart phone utilizes EPOC version 5 to provide combined PDA and cell-phone functionality.

Symbian is compatible with today's wireless networks, but is driven by the promise and potential of 3G. "There are three things we keep in mind," Strudely says. "The OS has to be robust because users won't stand for an operating system that crashes or loses connection during a transfer. Also, it has to be flexible, since we have five shareholders and at the moment another two licensees. They all have to be able to develop devices on the same platform but then compete in the same marketplace for the same customers. And finally, it has to be future friendly. We support all the existing standards and are working continuously to incorporate all the emerging standards as they are becoming adopted."

Currently, Symbian boasts 20 different projects under development by its licensees, many of which will make their debuts next year. "What we will see is things that have 80 percent of the operating system, and where 20 percent is a customizable user interface," Strudely continues. "Our partners can adapt the screen size as they want, for example. It also means that the hardware can be completely different. A Nokia phone will look and feel like a Nokia phone, but it will be completely compatible with and be able to synchronize...with any other Symbian-based phone, whether Motorola or Ericsson."

Symbian's proposition doesn't sound too different from the PC model—a platform to enable developers to create applications and know that they will work on any device that supports the platform. Object-oriented, Symbian EPOC uses C++ as well as Java and is designed to be flexible for the development of new applications. Today, Symbian supports a community of 35,000 registered developers. Applications in development include datebooks, contacts, email, short messaging service (SMS), and fax. "We are really big on the idea of an open platform," Strudely says. "We want other people to start developing for the OS to ensure that the wireless market kicks off."

The Symbian vision is that the EPOC-enabled mobile phones are in fact advanced clients. "They are more than browser-enabled handsets that have to be online and connected to the server to give you information," Strudely says. "They are devices where you can store applications and data on the actual device. You can download information such as a news page at a convenient time to you, and then read and handle it offline, which means you always have access to your data."

There's no doubt that Symbian's plans diverge from other approaches to combine cell phone and PDA functionality in one device. "The benefit of our system is that we are building a platform from the ground up, as opposed to trying to merge two different kinds of systems," Strudely says.

Internet savvy

While next-generation smart phones and connected PDAs have manufacturers, carriers, and service providers alike drooling at the market potential, the Internet appliance has faced stumbling blocks in consumer acceptance. However, that hasn't deterred growing interest from an increasing number of new entrants. The engines in these devices are OS kernels from such providers as QNX Software Systems and Wind River Systems, among others. QNX's Neutrino embedded microkernel OS, for example, powers 3Com's Audrey (see "Market magnet") and was used in Netpliance's recently deceased i-opener.

"Manufacturers of these devices are looking for as much of a head start as they can get," says Greg Bergsma, vice president of North American operations for QNX. "This is so they can concentrate on what's going to differentiate them in the marketplace. Speed to market is the main driver, because no one has the time to write their own operating system, their own email client, their own TCP/IP stack, and Web browser for a device."

A 20-year old company, QNX's roots lie in providing its RTOS (real-time OS) to the industrial and medical device arena. "A few years ago, we found that the memory footprint was such that consumer-electronics companies were interested in what we had to offer," Bergsma says. "Packing a lot of functionality into a small footprint is pretty important for these guys, because they are looking to shave a penny off these devices to be competitive in the marketplace."

Audrey uses Photon, QNX's microGUI windowing interface, on top of Neutrino and QNX's Voyager Web browser. As part of its work for 3Com, QNX also developed the technology that allows Audrey to sync with Palm devices.

"We are tending to see a lot of feature-rich design wins," says Paul Leroux, QNX technology analyst. "It's not about the device having one or two dedicated functions, but taking something of the things that people are used to on their PCs or Palms, and making those very simple to use and accessible. Also important as we go forward is that we provide standard API's [application programming interfaces] such as POSIX, which are very close to how things are implemented in Linux, and so Linux developers can participate in developing for that kind of device."

Bergsma expresses agreement. "If you look at the 3Com device, they want to enable development of applications for their specific device," he says. "They want to be able to provide the base technology in the consumer device and, with a comprehensive suite of technology, also enable a developer base to supply add-on components, much like what happens with the Palm."

Rising tide

Wind River counts as another RTOS that has set its sights on the Internet-appliance market. The company provides the VxWorks embedded OS, along with an embedded Web server, Java virtual machine, and connectivity stacks for TCP/IP and USB. Consumer product design wins include digital cameras, printers, and set-top boxes.

"Over the last few years, the bar keeps rising as to what a particular customer wants," says Sy Choudhury, senior marketing manager for Wind River's consumer business unit. "In the early 80s past, even a kernel was fine. By the late 80s, it became kernel with some basic TCP/IP networking. In the early to mid 90s, there began to be a focus on a complete development toolset. This high bar keeps rising, so more and more technology that is specific to a particular application is what our customers are requiring."

For the Internet-appliance market, Wind River offers Tornado for Internet Appliances, which in addition to the VxWorks OS and several development tools includes an embedded browser, an email client, and a personal information manager. All of these are customizable.

"The Internet-appliance arena is really the Wild West, where people are testing business models and features," Choudhury says. "It's all an issue of time to market. There is no reason that an OEM couldn't go off and build everything themselves. We've already built it, so OEMs say 'no thanks' to developing and will buy it from us and add their value through customization of particular applications." (For insight into how one company dealt with this dilemma, see the sidebar, "Build or buy?")

Despite these advantages, more than half of the embedded technology market still creates its operating platform internally, Choudhury says. "So convincing customers that they should go off the shelf is the bigger challenge," he says. "Lately, most OEMs realize that due to legacy reasons, if they start a new project, they'll go off the shelf at least for the core platform. The middleware becomes the next area where you have to convince them. That's where most of the competition is."

Sound advice

Today, everything from printers and digital cameras to Internet music players and set-top boxes comes packed with some kind of computing engine. MicroOS from e.Digital, for example, is a flexible real-time system designed to transparently manage writing, reading, and editing data on flash-memory chips. Taking less than 8 kbytes of memory, it serves as the backbone for all operations in handheld devices using either removable or embedded flash for data storage. MicroOS is compatible with virtually all types of removable flash memory as well as other standard IDE drives.

Applicable to any product that utilizes flash memory as its primary storage medium, MicroOS supports any type of data files including music, voice, text, images, and video. Some possible examples include voice recorders, one- and two-way voice pagers, cellular phones, portable digital music players, handheld PCs, home-audio components, car-audio components, and telephone answering devices.

Where MicroOS has found the most success is in digital audio players that support multiple codecs and digital-rights management. "The key is its flexibility and ability to manage multiple systems in a device," Putnam says. "If it's strictly MP3 then you don't need us, but if you also have WMA or AC3, and want to support each natively, that's where MicroOS comes in."

MicroOS also addresses power and memory issues common to complex portable digital devices. "MicroOS caters to handheld applications by eliminating the need for a high-powered CPU—thus paring down all necessary code to fit and run efficiently on a low-cost microcontroller while preserving valuable memory for other applications," Putnam says.

More importantly, MicroOS facilitates ease of use, flexibility, and reliablilty, and thus enables development teams to bring a product to market faster. "MicroOS serves as the glue to bind everything together and to make it easy to do so." Putnam says. "That helps to accelerate the development of a product to market more quickly."

Photo finish

Providing a platform for others to build on lies at the core of the business plan for Flashpoint Technology. Flashpoint's fully programmable OS for digital cameras and other imaging devices, Digita, has more than 5000 software developers. Those developers are creating applications including MP3 players, GPS capabilities, digital signature tracing for images, and connectivity to specific Web applications.

"There is a great benefit in having developer participation," says Stephen Saylor, Flashpoint's president. "The commercial photography business, for example, is a $14 million opportunity, but large vertical integrators support that community. With a programmable OS, developers can fine-tune camera functions for that application. For consumers, the camera is the front end of a system. It also allows the end systems to be tuned, resulting in ease of use for the consumer. People won't even know there's an operating system. All they will know is that it works."

Flashpoint developed Digita for digital cameras using technology acquired from Apple Computer and the VxWorks OS kernel. "Digita is targeted at photo appliances," Saylor says. "It is what we believe to be the world's smallest-footprint, Internet-ready, multimedia-savvy operating system. Its footprint is about a megabyte in ROM, which is pretty tight given the environment, and that we actually connect to the Web and have a full-color GUI."

Stephen Saylor

Saylor indicates that the stiffest competition comes from the fact that many OEMs still tend to want to write their own code. "The challenge we face is convincing camera manufacturers that they're better served by using a unified OS so they get the benefit of a developer community versus their desire to own the entire process," he says. Also, implementing Digita versus creating one's own camera OS allows OEMS to get to market faster and cheaper.

The fact that everyone seems to want to set a standard in operating systems can't help but raise the question, is there any efficacy to having a panoply of operating environments? Why can't one do the trick for PC and post-PC devices? Indicating the value of application specific OS environments, Flashpoint's Saylor notes that Microsoft, for example, tried to enter the digital-camera space but could not get Windows CE's boot-up time down to acceptable levels for camera use.

"Handheld products have unique demands in terms of user responsiveness," he says. "And they are a very focused appliance model device—small footprint and high performance. If you have a targeted OS within a space—such as Palm and handhelds, Digita and cameras, Symbian and cell phones—that makes sense. If you get out of your area of expertise, you make too many compromises for a focused appliance model."

Author information

Margot Suydam is the Technology Editor for CommVerge. She can be reached at msuydam@cahners.com.