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ANIL GUPTA talks about open OS, the differentiated experience that products and services offered by players will have to showcase and the importance of processor cores in an interview with PALLAB DUTTA…

What does Mobile Linux mean to handsets makers, OEMs and operators/carriers in terms of achieving economies of scale, time-to-market of newer applications, and consistent platform availability to a whole host of developers and third party software entities?

Anil Gupta: While there is still a fair bit of work that remains to be done, Mobile Linux has the potential of creating a much larger ecosystem for the mobile phone industry than exists today. While proprietary OS platforms like Symbian, WinCE/Windows Mobile and others have amply satisfied the current needs of the marketplace, the potential for far greater number of applications still remains. This is where Mobile Linux can create huge opportunities for application developers. While the open source movement will be the key driver for this, productisation would happen only when a corporate entity (like Red Hat for Linux) comes forward and provides a business-like "front-end" to the whole effort.

Can players afford to be platform agnostic in the long run and weigh the possibilities of more mature open platforms with industry regulated standards and specifications in place? Will the medium-term potential and success of open source be inhibited by thelack of a standardised application environment for developers and other third parties?

Anil Gupta: Indeed, the open source movement will take a while to mature and provide the "standard" environment. This is where the corporate -pushed "open" initiatives will take the lead in the shorter term. After the initial jockeying for one-upmanship, there would be a push for standardisation efforts in defining of standard API's and interfaces. Application developers, third parties and even service providers will have to "push" for this to happen - otherwise, their dedicated, platform- locked investments would give them limited returns. There would be standardisation with differentiation - the yin and the yang intertwined!

What does this new wave of activities and opportunities in the Mobile Open Source space mean for developers in getting software development kits, developer portals, shared platforms and shared specifications from the clutch of available players? Will the vast mass of consumers be the ultimate beneficiaries?

Anil Gupta: Openness eventually leads to commoditisation at a certain level, and only those who can offer a differentiated experience through product features and services would come out eventual winners. Interestingly, this never stops at a particular point in time - it is more like a treadmill and once you get on, you keep moving by offering more and more. Indeed, the consumers are great beneficiaries of this. However, the benefits are equally shared by the leaders within the whole mobile ecosystem (platform developers, portals, application developers, service providers/network operators etc.).

What will be the criteria and incentives that"independent" developers will consider to choose from the various rival groups and even stand-alone heavyweight OEMs/handset makers or influential network operators? Again, will a dominant and industry leading player be able to load/add proprietary technologies at a later stage once standards-based interoperability for applications and services are arrived at?

Anil Gupta: It is going to be a huge challenge for "independent" developers to take sides. They will need to tread very carefully, keeping an eye on how things evolve. It is not very clear who the next winners will be in this changing playing field. Clearly, in the short term, the existing heavyweights - both OEMs and network operators will need to be looked at. At the same time, they would need to work closely with innovators like Apple and Google who have the potential to change the whole mobile experience on its head. Both these companies were persona non grata in the mobile space until very recently; but both have unleashed a tsunami like revolution with their first products and prototypes. The leaders would always add proprietary technology extensions to the standard base, to create unique differentiators (and thereby additional business for themselves). However, they would then push for the adoption of this as extensions to the existing standards.

Discoverability (of applications and features on mobile phones and other hand-held communication devices by consumers) and personalization itself tend to be overlooked by almost all players in the ecosystem. What will it take customers to get to use and embrace such innovative or rich features and applications more and more in the future? Ultimately how do telecom carriers and influential handsets makers focus on more evangelizing, marketing-communication initiatives focus to engage consumers more deeply with their mobile devices?

Anil Gupta: As the plethora of applications increases, there would be application segments (e.g. for business and personal) as well as sub-segments (such as sales, finance, gaming, etc.) that would get created. On the business side, customers would be able to get formal training on the features. On the personal side, application and feature developers would indeed have the challenge of making applications very intuitive to use. Discovery here would have the benefit of no more than a teenager who is much more mobile savvy and can then "teach" or "train" the older generation on how to use an application or a feature. Apple has trail-blazed once again on this front, with the iPhone. They have shown the rest of the industry how to really make things intuitive and easy. Usability would indeed be a much more decisive factor in this domain.Telecom and handset makers would need to continue to use the tactics they use today to capture and engage the customers. Features and applications would be the differentiators. The challenge of picking the right mobile hand-set would become much bigger for the consumer. TV, Radio, Print and Web media would continue to enjoy huge ad revenues from these offerings.

With the emergence of a variety of mobile devices and sophisticated hand-held communication devices and the concomitant demand for processors, could you highlight the new evolutionary path for processors and the "technology characteristics" that will shape these processors? Please elaborate with respect to core performance, power consumption and architectural specifications..

Anil Gupta: With the need to support diverse features and applications (and even different radio protocols) in the same device, architectures would need to evolve towards a much more efficient support for each. Assuming that the mobile device will not be used much for "analysis" (as in a PC), it would imply that the need to support multiple, simultaneously running differing applications would be somewhat limited. This is not to say that if "live" video telephone conversations is taken as an application, the demands put on the circuitry to process both video and voice simultaneously could be ignored. Since battery size would continue to be small as in today's phones or even smaller, the number of hours of operation between charging would be very important. It is expected that better on-demand performance and power efficiency is realisable with multi-core architectures. This would then become the norm for most devices.

Since a whole host of handset makers in different markets utilize ARM's cores in different ways, how will challenges to create software and applications that work consistently across phones from multiple vendors be addressed?

Anil Gupta: Seamless interoperability of software and applications across different platforms from different vendors requires multiple components to come together in a standardised way. It is quite a fragmented world today and it will be a while before we get closer to the Holy Grail. The processor cores from ARM are one element that creates the commonality at the base level. At the next level, the Mobile SoC chips providers implement their chips with different features and provide different development environments often with their own development tools. While the commonality of the base processor architecture does enable relatively easy portability, the device drivers and other low- level software that gets written is customised to the unique offerings of each SoC platform. At the next level, multiple SoC providers to the same OEM/handset maker would also have a lot of commonality in their platform since the OEM demands that commonality for its hand-set platform. However, different OEMs have different requirements and the same Mobile SoC provider serving different OEMs needs to deliver different SoC's to each OEM based on their requirements. Thus, for perfect seamlessness to be achieved, there are a lot of things that would need to happen at multiple layers. The problem would need to be tackled at each layer, starting from the top, where the application developer at least gets the benefit of "standard" interfaces while the rest of the players in the ecosystem (handset maker, SoC maker, operator etc.) figure out how to differentiate and compete while interfacing to one another at "common" boundaries through standard methods.