Smartphones and feature-packed cell phones continue to cost too much for most people. While vendors have long promised lower-priced handsets that don't compromise, they've rarely delivered.

Everyone benefits if prices come down, however: Carriers earn higher average revenue per user (ARPU); content providers distribute more games, ringtones, TV shows, songs, etc.; manufacturers lower production costs; and a greater number of end-users get a chance to partake in the plethora of multimedia and data services made available by speedy 3G networks.

Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France and California based Jaluna says it has a solution to add these value-added services to mid-range handsets, virtualization; in the form of a low-level - BIOS-like - operating system (OS) called Jaluna OSware.

OSWare
Jaluna executive VP of corporate development Michel Glen told SmartPhoneToday, "Today's smartphones are extraordinarily expensive due to the need for hardware replication. To run smartphone applications, current phones require two CPU's, one to support the wireless modem stack and phones applications, and one to support a rich OS (Symbian, Windows or Linux) and its applications (games, multimedia, MP3, PIM, etc.). It also requires dual access memory, internal connections, even multiple speakers."

Jaluna's technology allows operating environment applications and OS to coexist on same CPU in a smartphone.

The company "provides hardware virtualization technology that supports the rich OS and its applications, wireless modem stack and phone applications together, directly on the main processor. Jaluna OSware allows both software environments to share the same CPU and peripherals (audio, video, keypads, power management, etc.)", Glen added.

Because their software sits on a chipset directly, it is the first software that boots; distributing all the peripheral and memory information before the main device platform launches.

The phone system then boots the main operating system, which could be any smartphone platform. Today, Linux—Jaluna is a founding member of the LiPS forum, an organization that promotes Linux for mobility—and Windows Mobile are supported.

Jaluna told SmartPhoneToday they are working with Microsoft on a demo unit that supports the Windows Mobile profile. They're in talks with Symbian as well.

The aim is to lower the price of smartphones to the same level as a mid-range feature phone by reducing the amount of hardware needed to run full-featured smartphone platforms. With OSware, Jaluna asserts manufacturers can bring these platforms to new or existing feature phones without recoding.

VP of marketing & business development Mark Milligan says Jaluna's "partners see this as an opportunity to rapidly build and deploy a new, cost effective product, helping them gain market share by providing the functionality of a high-end smartphone at the price of a mid-range phone."

End users get all the fancy applications and games out of their smartphone they would from a high-end model, but at a much lower price.

Security
Jaluna not only sees its OSWare as a way to reduce cost, but to increase security as well. Increasingly, as we've often seen, richer mobile OSs running on connected devices attract the same type of problems and malware as PCs.

Jaluna says a second OS - like OSware - running at a lower level offers a form of protection. Because—with multiple system platforms—a Trojan or virus could shut down the main OS while the lower level OS keeps basic phone functions running.

"They (Jaluna OSware and Linux or Windows Mobile, for example) are securely protected from one another. The rich OS and applications can fail but the end user can still receive or place a call and communicate as they would with dedicated hardware," according to Glenn.

Glenn sees advantages in security beyond just chasing down viruses. A low level OS could give content (encrypted, DRM, financial data, etc.) a safer place to reside; away from prying eyes, so to speak

OSWare Phone
Linux smartphones running Jaluna OSware may arrive by the end of the year. OSWare is now available for the ARM9 family of mobile processors. Philips Semiconductors also recently selected Jaluna OSware, Linux Edition for its ARM9 family, as part of its chipset solution for new 2.75G / 3G mobile phones.

According to Jaluna, Philips already has customers on tap for this chipset for later this year. Expect it to be a high-functioning feature phone priced at a mid-range level.