full operating system on Iphone?

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In the keynote speech, he said it had a full operating system and not something for phones. What does this mean? Is the calender app going to be the same thing as ical?
 

dtravis7


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In the keynote speech, he said it had a full operating system and not something for phones. What does this mean? Is the calender app going to be the same thing as ical?

All I know for sure is it's a version of OSX. More will be revealed the day the phone is launched I am sure.
 
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Watch Slashdot after its release. Within a week, my guess is that you'll be able to see the physical internals of the iPhone as well as the logical internals. Within a couple weeks someone will have found a way to host some version of Linux...

...which brings to mind what is meant by a Full Operating System.

With Linux for instance, you can compile a custom OS kernel with whatever capabilities you want. You can compile it for a specific processor, file system, hardware suite, and - more importantly - you can modularize it so that not everything need be loaded natively; you simply load modules as needed. I've compiled Linux kernels that are minimalist, and kernels that could run on wide ranges of hardware. Both extremes represent full OSs, but they're clearly different. Given that OS X is a BSD variant, my guess is that its kernel can be compiled similarly.

Accordingly, the iPhone version of OS X should only have those capabilities necessary to support the iPhone hardware, and it should have them all native in the kernel. Anything not relevant to the hardware will not be present.

Among other things, an OS is simply software that allows applications to interface with hardware. The version of OS X that's in the iPhone could include the same s/w that's in my MacBook. That's a smart thing to do! However, the iPhone need not support a 1280x800 display, so that code would not be present. In contrast, my MacBook does not have accelerometers to detect when I rotate it (not that I typically rotate my MacBook). That is, however, something the iPhone needs, so software to interface with the built-in accelerometers would need to be in the OS.

iPhone will have a "full operating system" on it. While it shares code with modern day Macs, it will be designed to run only on the iPhone hardware.
 
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In contrast, my MacBook does not have accelerometers to detect when I rotate it (not that I typically rotate my MacBook). That is, however, something the iPhone needs, so software to interface with the built-in accelerometers would need to be in the OS.

Are motion sensors the same as accelerometers? If they are, I'm pretty sure that the MacBook has them. The system uses them to stop the hard disk from spinning when it senses it's being dropped. There's a bunch of programs that make use of this feature too, such as iAlertU and Macsaber.
 
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Are motion sensors the same as accelerometers? If they are, I'm pretty sure that the MacBook has them. The system uses them to stop the hard disk from spinning when it senses it's being dropped. There's a bunch of programs that make use of this feature too, such as iAlertU and Macsaber.
My guess is that they are the same. Wow! I never suspected the MacBook has them, but that's cool and a good thing. I Googled it to learn more, and you're right. ^_^

Nice catch! I've learned something new.
 
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I can't wait for the AppleTV hackers to jump on the iPhone :D
 

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