DavidCooper wrote:
mdaniels247 wrote:
After that, how long would it take for me to create my own mobile operating system?
The difficulty with that would be finding a phone which is sufficiently well documented to be able to write an OS for it. Has anyone here managed to do it yet? Big companies share information to get the hardware and software working together, but they don't tend to make it so easy for the rest of us. They can also throw several hundred people at any problem and pay them to work at it full time, while everything we write is likely to become out of date long before it's finished, with the device it's designed to run on relegated to museums. A phone with PC architecture would change all that though, allowing even beginners to write simple OSes that can run on it, while some of the people here could probably use theirs to access the Internet via WIFI with little or no modification. Maybe that'll happen some day.
When I was developing smartphone OSs, each new chip (ARM + various IP blocks) would be used in a family of products, at most half a dozen all with the same internals. A chip version didn't last very long, max 1 year. We had prototypes built for us internally and we had some months to get everything working. Smaller companies used reference boards from the chip manufacturers like the ones shown
here. The book "Symbian OS Internals" is a quite good intro to phone hardware and system design considerations. At one time Symbian said a base port (getting it up and running on new hardware) should only take about 2 months. That wasn't really true....
Edit: The Symbian OS references show how long ago it was I was involved in smartphone development!