Apple

Mozilla, Skype, and Cydia have joined the EFF in trying to legitimize iPhone jailbreaking.

(Credit: Apple)

Mozilla has thrown its support behind the Electronic Frontier Foundation's push to have the U.S. Copyright Office allow iPhone jailbreaking.

CEO John Lilly told Computerworld that "choice is good for users, and choice shouldn't be criminalized," in light of the dispute between the EFF and Apple over whether or not iPhone jailbreaking--the practice of modifying an iPhone to accept software from sources other than Apple--is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Last week Apple declared that jailbreaking an iPhone violates Apple's copyright and can cause all sorts of technical problems for the user in response to a petition from the EFF that iPhone jailbreaking be given a DMCA exemption.

Lilly's motivation would seem pretty clear: a version of the Firefox mobile browser, Fennec, for the iPhone. However, Lilly told Computerworld that he wasn't sure Mozilla would ever want to develop an iPhone version of Fennec even if Apple was forced to open up the iPhone. Apple offers Web browser alternatives to the default Safari browser in the App Store, but they aren't true alternatives since they are all required to use the Webkit rendering engine used in Safari.

"Given the choice, would we work on a platform where the sole company controlling it makes us unwelcome, or would we work on a platform, like Linux, where we are welcome? The answer is going to be easy for us," Lilly told Computerworld.

Two other software developers joined Mozilla in supporting the EFF's petition: Skype and Cydia. Cydia is exactly the piece of software that Apple railed against in its response to the EFF's petition, as it lets iPhone owners install applications from any source, rather than just the App Store. In his remarks submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office, Jay Freeman of Saurik, Cydia's developer, said "Cydia is now installed on 1.6 million devices worldwide, at least a quarter of which are within the United States."

Updated 10:00am PT with detail from Verizon's conference call.

The LiMo Foundation is adding several well-known entities to its roster of mobile phone players, including Verizon and Mozilla.

A total of eight companies have agreed to join forces with LiMo to work on a Linux-based operating system for mobile phones, bringing the total number of participants to 40. Verizon and Mozilla are the headliners, but the full roster of new invitees includes Infineon, Kvaleberg, Red Bend Software, Sagem Mobiles, SFR, and SK Telecom.

Reports surfaced over the weekend that Verizon was planning to add a LiMo phone to its lineup, but it's not clear how quickly Verizon will commit to that course. Mozilla's participation is likewise interesting, because it's very likely that browsers will play an integral role in delivering applications to future mobile phones.

LiMo Foundation members are emerging, in a sense, as the anti-Android, although they would likely downplay that kind of talk. Google's bid to unite the mobile phone industry around Linux is similar to LiMo's vision, but there are a few differences.

LiMo is set up more like a traditional industry organization, where members have an equal say in the advancement of the software. Google reigns supreme over the Open Handset Alliance, although it does work closely with its partners to define the spec that will become Android. Plenty of companies, however, such as NTT DoCoMo and Texas Instruments, are hedging their bets by participating in both groups.

LiMo has one advantage: an actual product out in the wild. Release Candidate 1 was formally unveiled at the CTIA Wireless conference in April, but has been shipping for a while on phones like Motorola's Razr 2.

UPDATED: Verizon held a conference call in the pre-dawn Pacific Time hours to discuss its decision to join the LiMo Foundation. Reuters reports that Verizon's vice president of network Kyle Malady committed the company to releasing a LiMo phone in 2009, saying, "We'll start with a few simpler devices and work our way up."

He also said that the LiMo software would become Verizon's "operating system of choice," according to Reuters, which seems odd given the company's pledge to become an open service provider willing to accept a wide variety of handsets. Malady said that's still the case--at some point Verizon customers will be able to use any type of device that works with its network--but this deal would give Verizon a way to maintain control over the look-and-feel of the software on its handsets for certain customers.

The iPhone isn't a true mobile computer yet, but it's on the right track, according to a Mozilla executive.

Will there be two separate Firefox browsers for smartphones and PCs or one to rule them all?

(Credit: Mozilla)

"Getting a no-compromise web experience on devices requires significant memory (>=64MB) as well as significant CPU horsepower. High end devices today are just approaching these requirements and will be commonplace soon," wrote Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Mozilla, in a blog post Tuesday, implying that while the iPhone and its current competitors don't quite have what it takes under the hood to be full-fledged mobile computers, we're not all that far away.

It seems to me like there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing going on here. Are smartphones slower than people would like because the hardware is too rudimentary, or because truly useful software is too bloated for the limited memory and power requirements of smartphones? I don't think too many people bought an iPhone expecting it would be just as zippy as their PC, but just how much slower is it than a PC?

Schroepfer thinks, based on third-party tests, that the iPhone is about 10 to 100 times slower than a MacBook Pro on scripting benchmarks and about 3 to 5 times slower than a ThinkPad T40 laptop when operating on the same Wi-Fi network. "But rapid improvements in mobile processors will close this gap within a few years," he wrote.

He estimates that the iPhone is using about 128MB of system RAM, and a processor (known to be an ARM-based chip from Samsung) running at between 400MHz and 600MHz. Apple's iPhone application development policy means we're not going to see Firefox on the iPhone anytime soon, but that's information that Mozilla is using to work on future mobile browsers for devices like the iPhone that won't be able to run unmodified PC software for several years.

As Schroepfer notes, the nice thing about the chip industry is that we can be reasonably sure that there will be more performance to work with every couple of years. Both ARM and Intel have set aggressive performance and power consumption goals for chips due out over the next several years.

But Schoepfer seems to be operating under the assumption that it's the hardware that is holding back a true Internet experience on a smartphone. "Up until very recently, device limitations required writing new mobile browsers from the ground up," he wrote. I wonder if that was such a bad thing; I'm sure to save time and effort developers would rather port as much of their PC code as is feasible over to smartphones, but is it better to develop mobile software that's designed specifically for mobile devices or to investigate ways to move the multitude of software that's already out there for PCs to a new category of mobile devices?

Mozilla wants to work both sides of the fence, not wanting to throw away all the work they've done on PC development when mobile processors are bound to get more capable, but recognizing that mobile-computing requirements are different. "There is far from a dominant player in this marketplace and even the best mobile browsers today have compromises in user experience, performance, and compatibility. There is still *plenty* of room for innovation," Schroepfer wrote.

I'm no software developer, and I'd welcome feedback about this from those who are examining this problem. It seems pretty clear to me that true mobile computing is going to require new thinking about software development in addition to faster hardware, the same way multicore processors have shaken up the PC software development industry. And those concepts are even going to merge at some point: by 2010 ARM's partners will have multicore mobile processors on the market.

Does that mean personal-computing software development is headed down two different development paths or that smartphone developers and PC developers are converging at some point down the road? Let me know what you think.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--If you're not exactly sure what you want in a mobile computer, don't worry: the folks who are building them aren't entirely sure themselves.

The consensus among five panelists gathered here at the ARM Developers Conference was that this is a very interesting and confusing time to be thinking about the future of mobile computing, because the playing field is so wide open and because consumers haven't decided exactly what they want.

"It's sort of like Darwin," said Tony Milbourn, director of mobile devices at Motorola. "We don't know what people want, we put them out there and see what people will buy."

This is about the quest for the next big mobile computer, something more attractive than a UMPC but more powerful than a Treo. It's been a very common topic of late, with the craziness attached to anything related to Apple's iPhone and Intel's clear goal of throwing its hat into the mobile computer race.

The iPhone is very much on everyone's mind (at ARM's press conference earlier in the day, executives from about six different companies had a picture of the iPhone in their presentations), but more will be needed if regular people are going to embrace true handheld mobile computing.

There's three technologies that must evolve for this to happen. Motorola's Milbourn thinks that bandwidth speeds have to improve to allow mobile applications to flourish. Other panelists, such as Jorgen Behrens of Symbian and John Lilly of the Mozilla Foundation thought it was all about applications and the user interface. And obviously, the hardware is going to have to deliver sufficient performance at battery-friendly power levels.

"The operating system is very important, but it's mostly important for the people making the devices," said Behrens, executive vice president of marketing for Symbian. The combination of the browser and the user interface dictate whether or not people will enjoy their experience, he said.

That suited Lilly just fine. The chief operating officer of the Firefox development organization thinks that the browsing experience is going to be extremely important for mobile computers, especially as people rely more and more on Web-based applications, like Facebook, Google and countless others. The problem is that right now, the memory footprint needed for an advanced browser to support those Web applications is way too large. Mozilla is working on a solution to that problem, and this reliance on Web applications could make the debate over third-party applications on the iPhone moot, he said.

Web applications also bypass the problem of operating system fragmentation in this world, according to several panelists. One reason (among others) that Microsoft came to dominate the market for PC operating system was the need to have a common platform for applications in a non-networked world, Milbourn said. But this industry is evolving in a very different way.

"There's an extraordinary awareness of not handing Microsoft the keys to another kingdom," said Jim Ready, CEO of MontaVista, which earlier in the day signed a collaboration deal with five other ARM licensees to work on Linux products for this category. "(The fragmentation) may indirectly benefit Microsoft if you think you need a real common platform with a lot of applications. But if you're on the Internet, the local platform isn't as common."

Despite Intel and Microsoft's interest in future mobile computers, don't expect the scenario that played out more than 20 years ago to happen again. "This is not going to be the PC market," said Mike Muller, CTO of ARM. "There is going to be diversity and I don't think there's going to be one product or one winner."