Except for a single very powerful radio emission aimed at Jupiter, the four-million year old black monolith has remained completely inert. Its origin and purpose are still a total mystery.
– 2001 A Space Odyssey
Intel and Novell announced today that they will collaborate to promote Intel’s Moblin operating system, a rival Linux distribution for mobile devices. Novell also announced it is developing a Moblin-based version of SUSE Linux optimized for Intel Atom-based netbooks.
Whereas Google is initially targeting smartphones with Android (though an Android-based Netbook has apparently been released), Intel is targeting Moblin at Netbooks and handheld Mobile Internet Devices.
Intel launched Moblin in 2007 and incubated the effort until last month when the Linux Foundation became host of the community. Intel continues to contribute key technologies and work with the developer community to advance the effort. Novell began contributing to the Moblin project last October.
According to Guy Lunardi, Novell’s Director of Client Preloads, in an interview, “it’s very possible you will see Novell going to market with OEMs on pre-installations on netbooks as early as a few weeks after the final release of Moblin 2.0.”
ASUS expects to sell roughly 7 million netbooks in 2009, while Acer expects to sell 12-13 million netbooks this year. Shipments of netbooks in 2009 could top 30 million units, or almost 20% of total notebook sales in 2009. Some 90% of Netbooks run on Windows XP.
Smartphones get about 12 per cent of the cellphone market, with total smartphone sales in 2008 reaching 139.3 million units. Informa predicts sales of new smartphones will grow over 30% in 2009 to 211.2 million units, driven by innovative new devices and operator subsidies designed to promote mobile data consumption.
Whereas Google’s Android runs on ARM processors – as well as Atom chips – Intel’s Moblin project was Atom-centric. Now, with broader support, many observers believe the platform will evolve beyond Intel chips.
Though Ubuntu made the first forays for Linux in the Netbook market, Novell and Intel could end up dominating it, opines C/Net. MIDs could be a whole new market segment.
Whether Microsoft, Linux, or Apple will come to dominate the platform is still unknown.
