What Is Mobile Virtualization Exactly Trying To Solve?

Platform virtualization has been all about optimizing the hardware resources, after it’s inception in 1960′s it has grown into a big market. With virtualization becoming a pre-requisite for cloud computing the future is only looking brighter.

But one thing which always makes me wonder, what is mobile virtualization exactly trying to solve?

Let’s look at the three important problems mobile virtualization is going to solve,Viz.,

Convergence of Enterprise connectivity and Personalization -

Enterprise connectivity and personalization on mobile phones has traditionally been completely different niche altogether, with Blackberry ruling the enterprise space followed by windows mobile. iPhone revolutionized the mobile phone personalization becoming an icon in this space and now Android sold more than a million devices is another contender.

With increasing computing capabilities of smartphones, the users wanting convergence of their persona i.e., Enterprise connectivity, personalization and basic phone capabilities on one device, and mobile virtualization solves the problem instantly.

Recent development in this space happened earlier this year. VMware, the leader in virtualization demoed it’s mobile platform where in they loaded Windows CE and Android on a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet.

Smartphone capability on feature phones -

This is the most interesting problem, that Mobile platform virtualization solves. Feature phones offer a trade-off between low cost phones and smartphones occupying the mid-segment. They typically have two chips, one for DSP and a RISC CPU to run RTOS, JAVA and flash applications, while Smartphones have three or more chips running an Open OS and other advanced features making them costlier.

VirualLogix’s VLX Real time virtualization offers a solution better to  the traditional transparent virtualization, enabling RTOS and Open OS run on a single chip while maintaining QoS. As a proof, NXP and Purple Labs are working on a sub $100 3G multimedia phone which runs Linux and RTOS on a single NXP chip using VirtualLogix’s solution.

Bringing smartphone capability on feature phones will make the advanced wireless technologies like 3G more accessible to emerging markets including India, and as pointed out by T V Ramachandran – the wireless technologies like 3G will  stimulate economic activity across the sectors due to multiplier effect.

Variant Management -

Mobile handset vendors spend significant amount of time and money getting new variants into the market. Every single variant consumes lot of effort porting the software stack and testing the Operating system & device drivers on chip sets apart from the UI testing where the differentiation between variants is implemented. Here the problem is that Operating system and applications are closely tied to the hardware.

Mobile virtualization removes this dependency and virtualizes the hardware, allowing the use of same software stack including the device drivers on different devices. Thus significantly decreasing the cost and time required to release a new mobile phone variant.

Monica Basso, Research Vice President at Gartner said, “Gartner sees virtualization in the mobile space as a very promising and potentially a fast emerging market. We predict that by 2012, more than 50% of new smart phones shipped will be virtualized. Virtualization can enable enterprises and consumers to easily manage and secure their phones and it can also help handset vendors reduce bills of materials and shorten development cycles to allow for faster releases.” as quoted on NY Times.