Advanced

7 Mobile Operating Systems You Might Never Use

Posted by lordpenguin on · 10 comments
thepowerbase.com; By Dean Howell 		Mail this story
Print this story

With iOS and Android dominating the mobile space, it’s sometimes hard to remember that it’s actually a congested and cluttered market. They are quite a few operating systems that are either in an incubating period, or already in your local Verizon store vying for your attention.

This attention costs a lot of money and it’s really hard to exploit when these units are tucked away in a corner, or merely advertised on an endcap.

But I’m not here to talk about Windows Phone 7. I’m not here to talk about Blackberry or Symbian. See just like on the desktop, there are other things out there. Operating systems that can run on your ARM-powered tablet or phone that are not found on store shelves. Let’s start with the most important ones first...

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: Roundups; Groups: Linux

» Get new stories by e-mail: nightly or as they are published

« Return to the newswire homepage

  Related stories
» More like this

Comments (10)

caitlyn ·
Some of the "never use" platforms are better than Android, IMNSHO. Unfortunately, as always, marketing and mind share rule and quality really doesn't matter.
dinotrac ·
I agree with the author that WebOS is awesome.

HP deserved all of the "moron of the year" awards it earned for ditching the platform.
lcafiero ·
Agree with you 100 percent dino -- WebOS is pretty decent, and HP really earned all the criticism it got (and gets) for dumping it.
helios ·
My youngest had a palm pre and was showing me around her phone one day, and it was runing WebOS. I was impressed with the both its logic and speed. But then life happened. WebOS was deemed terminal. Unity was Kinged in absentia and further accusations of steroid use in baseball became illegal without signed and sealed testimony to the contrary.

In the long run, I'm not sure HP couldn't do more for Desktop Linux than Google can (could).
dinotrac ·
@Ken --

Never mind how nice it is to see your ornery self around these parts, but I agree that steroid use at HP could ruin blogging a baseball game from your Touchpad.
helios ·
Thanks dino....my point 'xactly. Glad someone snapped it off.
Bob_Robertson ·
HP lost me as a customer when their laptop BIOS refused to recognize an Atheros wifi card to replace the Broadcom POS that came with it.

Khamul ·
@Bob: I'm sorry, I'm a little confused: why does the BIOS need to recognize a WiFi card at all? Isn't that solely an OS issue? As long as your OS has the right driver, what's the problem?
caitlyn ·
Same questions as @Khamul. BTW, the Broadcom 4312 chipset in my HP Mini 110 netbook has the best range of any wifi card/chip I've used. I see the whole neighborhood's wifi when I look at wicd. LOL. Considering that Broadcom has open sourced the driver and permitted distros to package the firmware at will I no longer object to their chips at all. Mine works very well and does so out of the virtual box on most recent distro releases.
jdixon ·
> ...why does the BIOS need to recognize a WiFi card at all?

He documented the entire story either in a blog post or a thread here. Perhaps both.

As to why, you'd have to ask HP. No one else on earth has a clue.

Post a comment

A free account is needed to post. Write your comment here first: your text is kept in this browser while you sign up or log in, and is waiting for you when you come back.

Your message:
|||||
10
Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, [text](https://link), - lists, > quotes, $x^2$ for math. Formatting help

Sign up and post (it is free)  or  Log in and post