Android Phones Get Virtualization 122
bednarz writes "VMware is teaming with LG to sell Android smartphones that are virtualized, allowing a single phone to run two operating systems, one for business use and one for personal use. A user's personal email and applications would run natively on the Android phone, while a guest operating system contains the employee's work environment. The devices would also have two phone numbers."
Re:Cool idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Although I'd appreciate a phone that, for once, did the basic things right first. Like with car stereos, I have yet to find a device that does not have one or more major annoyances.
Most phones have those annoyances, but our problem is that we constantly shift expectations of what "the basic things" are. Not long ago, basic meant "voice". So if you go back to basic old Motorola phones, the voice was fine but they had clunky speed dial memory schemes. Fast forward a few years, and we had good voice and contact lists, but SMS was awful. Then came Bluetooth and MP3 players, most of which were slow and/or crashed often, but SMS was improved with T9. Now we have phones that do voice, music, Bluetooth, MMS, etc., but web surfing is awful. Or the walled gardens chafe. Or something else is annoying.
Truly basic phones (large-face screens, number-only buttons, no features to do anything else) sell well with a certain group of people who no longer wish to learn the latest in technology on an annual basis, and they are fine at what they do. But of course that may be "too basic" for average tastes these days.
Re:Computing Power? (Score:5, Insightful)
The real trick(though I'm not sure that virtualization is a good answer) is getting the vastly increased amount of user state, some of it either personally or business sensitive, separated in some logical way...
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Virtualization, in my server/workstation experience, has three major benefits
And yet you don't mention sandboxing, which is one of the things this article touches on.
*Many* people around here have advocated VMs as a way to protect your personal data from potentially malicious software, to the point of even suggesting browsers should be run under such an environment. The fact that *you* don't see that as a benefit doesn't mean said benefit doesn't exist.