by
Brian Madden
Apparently VMware bought some technology from a company called Trango Virtual Machines last month which they're launching today as the "VMware Mobile Virtual Platform" (VMware MVP). The point of this is not so a user can run multiple VMs on a mobile device at the same time, but instead so that different types of phones can run the same OS image. (In this case, the Trango hypervisor or whatever you call it would "scrub" and hide the details of the hardware from the mobile phone OS.)
The problem today is that each time a new mobile phone is designed, the OS of that phone has to be modified to work with that device's specific capabilities and hardware. With VMware MVP, the phone maker could install just the low-level realtime stuff on the phone (call handling, DRM, etc.), while the actual OS that the user interacts with could just be snapped in as a VM. This means that games, ring tones, email, address books, photos, and all the other crap that people want on their phones could be more easily made available on any phone.
Ultimately this could even mean someone could have different OS configurations (or even entirely different OSes) on the same device. So instead of having a work cell phone and a personal cell phone, you could boot your phone up with the Windows Mobile-based work OS during the day, and boot to a Symbian-based personal OS after hours.
MVP will not be something that consumers buy. Instead, VMware will sell it to the phone device makers.
Is this interesting to us in the desktop and application delivery world? Possibly. I don't think you'll be seeing any desktop-class OS running in a VM on a phone-class device anytime soon. But maybe MVP could lead to some standardization of the phone OSes so that some vendors could focus on phones that tie into remote or virtualized applications.
What do you think?
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