VMware demoed a touchscreen Nokia N800 featuring its mobile hypervisor at its VMworld Europe 2009 conference in Cannes today, showing Windows CE and Google"s Android running at the same time. VMware picked up Mobile Virtualisation Platform (MVP) technology after it acquired Trango Virtual Processors. Customers can run two operating systems on one phone simultaneously, or move their phone"s contacts, apps and other data from handset to handset easily using virtualisation technology regardless of the underlying hardware or the user interface or input method.
The phones with VMware"s mobile virtualisation platform will have 2 main functions.
- Allow users back up their system and data on a VM, so that they can easily transfer contacts and other information regardless of the operating system if they get a new phone.
- Run multiple VM instances on a single phone allowing users have multiple profiles on the same phone, transfer profiles & data sets across handsets.
MVP is currently in evaluation stage and under testing in the hands of phone manufacturers. All major operating systems including Apple"s OS have been tested. The software will be embedded on handsets at the manufacturing stage, and is designed to run on devices with limited memory without straining batteries. Such phones could have two numbers and call handling will be decided by user-set policies.
You can watch the demo video (which uses Nokia N800) below. The booting process and the application in use can be seen in the same screen side by side.
Video Courtesy: ITPRO