OStatic

The Associated Press has an interesting story out today about a group of MIT students who set out to show the power of open cell phone systems. MIT professor Hal Abelson challenged them to design an application for cell phones based on Android, Google's upcoming Linux-based mobile operating system. According to the AP story: "In the process, they revealed the power of an open system like Android to shake up the mobile phone industry, where wireless companies are being pressured to loosen the control they have maintained over what devices do." Is there something to this?

The majority of the students who accepted Abelson's challenge produced applications focused on location and social features. This, of course, closely tracks what's going on with many commercial mobile applications. Whrrl, for example,has gotten a lot of buzz for its ability to track you, your friends and when you might be able to meet up. According to the AP story, one application that the students came up with was called Flare, designed to help small businesses such as pizza deliverers track their drivers.

While the Open Handset Alliance, which includes about 30 wireless companies, has announced plans for many Android-based phones, there aren't any yet, so the students produced their applications on a computer designed to work like a phone. In the end, officials from Google who were observing the student challenge said that the applications they created were as good as any being developed in Google's official Android developer challenge.

This is yet more evidence of the fact that open source mobile platforms have a bright future, and can usher in as-yet-unseen applications. As we've written before, open source applications such as the Mozilla mobile browser Fennec, plus the many new Linux-based mobile phones coming to market can represent a big challenge to traditional mobile phone platforms. Open source platforms could strongly shake up the pricing models for mobile services and applications as well--not to mention handset prices.

This is a good trend all around, and will increase competition in the mobile technology arena. If you ever spend time cursing your cell phone and the expensive applications and services on it, watch as open source offerings level the playing field.

• mozilla
• Android
• google
• linux
• Fennec