WhiteHedge Blog

Mobile virtualization market is undergoing great innovation and change. Mobiles become a smart device with rich functionalities built in along with mobile services. Handset vendors are facing increasing competition pressure to bring rich phones to market. They have started thinking of migrating from proprietary operating system to open source operating system with same level of security and services, which helps them to get market faster. Besides just phone functionality mobiles provides features like music, photos, video, GPRS, data storage capability and also able to run enterprise applications like CRM, bill payments, banking, emailing, browsing, social networking etc and that’s make it more valuable.

What is mobile virtualization?

It is a thin layer of software that is embedded on a mobile phone to decouple the applications and data from the underlying hardware. It is optimized to run efficiently on low power consumption and memory constrains. it removes the dependency and virtualizes the hardware by allowing of same software or device drivers to run on multiple devices.

To whom and how it will benefit?

To Handset manufacturers: Typically a smart phone requires 2 to 3 processors in-built in phones to give rich functionality.

• A baseband processor which enable phone to communicate
• An application processor for running small and enterprise applications
• And a multimedia processor for handling graphics, audio and video things.

All these can be accomplished in just one or two processors instead of having of three which will certainly reduce their development cost and help to get market faster.

To mobile application developers: Here the problem of Operating system and applications, which are closely tied to hardware. Currently programmers have to rewrite every mobile application  for each of various OS including Symbian, Microsoft’s windows Mobile or Google’s Android,  virtualization software would enable a developer  to add application features regardless of operating system, so one can a grab a application written for different OS system and easily can integrate them in one.

To end user: This will benefit to end user in a way that their data can be easily ported from one to another handset. It also helps them to retrieve data more easily when handset is damaged. People who have configured emails, web access or applications can easily migrate entire image to another handset. It is also possible for users to run multiple personalities on same phone.

VirtualLogix Inc, Open Kernel Labs Inc, Vmware are few who have heavily invested in this project two years before to bring this to the market by end of 2012. Hope that virtualization will bring tremendous value addition to the mobile technology. But it is still uncertain and yet to prove.