Norway's Trolltech has demonstrated the first fully reprogrammable mobile handset to help phone designers innovate as fast as their counterparts in the PC industry, a Reuters report said.
A major divide that separates PCs from mobile telephones is that while designers can freely reprogram a computer's software, most of a phone's functions are fixed at the factory, the Reuters report said.
'[Independent] developers are having a hard time figuring out how to participate in the mobile phone market,' Benoit Schillings, Trolltech's CTO was quoted as saying.
Trolltech, the world's top supplier of Linux software for mobile phones, said it will offer a mobile cameraphone running on the international GSM/GPRS standard it calls Greenphone, the report said.
The Reuters report further said Trolltech's phone is priced at around $690 and comes with all the software and source code necessary to develop a complete mobile phone model, including core Linux operating system controls, a phone dialer, address book and camera application.
The phone is not aimed at consumers, but would allow a wide audience of designers to create new features for future mobile phones, the report said.
While the Greenphone, which is due out in September, opens up the field of mobile phone development to small design firms and individuals, it gives large organizations a fully functioning test environment with which to develop new models, the report further said.