Windows mobiles, OS X on Apple iPhone; what about Linux? Maybe not even close to the others, but it's here on the mobile handset arena too. It's been around for a while and been talked a lot, however it's not done as good as the rest of the OS's for mobiles. One reason for this maybe that Linux is a platform for open source developers and a "platform" has been missing for most of the community based developers. Motorola has Linux based phones; Google is leading on the Android platform. Many others like Access Linux Platform, OpenZaurus and Qtopia are all examples of Linux based mobile OS's.
The good news now is we have an open source mobile phone, the "Neo FreeRunner" (The previous version was the Neo 1973), the phone runs Openmoko Linux which is I guess Debian based like Ubuntu is. So what difference does it make? "Freedom"! now developers can freely modify and develop the as they please ( ability to modify the operating system and software stack). This is in no way yet the replacement for iPhones or your avrage Nokia Nseries phones. It's assumed that most of the users of the Neo FreeRunner will be hardcore hackers who want to explore and experiment. There can be good commercial applications as well, as it's an open platform but this is yet to be explored. One area which I would really wanna go into this is to implement a "Thaana" based phone. This might be the ideal platform for it. Linux supports Thaana and with some effort I am sure it will be easy to implement a Thaana based GUI into the phone. Not that I want to be the one who is assigned with the task; but it's a good challage for those of you out there who are willing to give it a try.
Other such platforms besides Neo include TuxPhone and the Greenphone.
