[ILUG] Android gone Free

[David Dolphin]

A Forwarded response from a Symbian employee:

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 08:44, John P. Looney <valen at tuatha.org> wrote:
> Anyone know if their $1500 licence for Symbian gives you radio drivers
> that you can port to other platforms ?
Whose? nokia's? I seriously doubt it. Even those of us with full nokia
access can't get at that source. However, they'll be opening up source
next year I think, so that stuff will probably be made
available. There is another problem anyhow, which is quite
bigger. Released nokia hardware will only take signed roms. You dont
have the key. We dont have the key. only nokia have the key and it's
probably locked in a tiny dark little room in Oulu.

You'd probably have better look with Uiq based phones, but really
putting it on propietry hardware is going to be an uphill battle for
anyone. Getting an OS running on a phone is hard. Companies are very
secretive about how they do it, and they dont want people have such
low level access to the radio etc. It's like in the old days when
computers had modems in them, if malware got on it could cost a
fortune. Imagine that, but with mobile tariffs.


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