Virtualisation comes to mobiles

MOBILE VIRTUALISATION SPECIALIST Open Kernel Labs has announced the availability of its Android virtualisation tool One Core.

The mobile hypervisor acts much like its desktop counterparts from VMWare, Xen and Citrix, allowing users to run Android on top the firm's OKL 4.0 hypervisor. OKL is pitching its One Core software to handset developers and mobile operators as a cheap way of deploying Android on their devices.

The hypervisor supports a multitude of chipsets allowing the developers to ignore the underlying hardware and worry about taking advantage of Android's features. The firm has seen considerable success with its mobile virtualisation technology, shipping the software in a number of headline devices such as HTC's Hero, Motorola's Droid and the ailing Palm Pre.

Open Kernel Labs is also using the hypervisor to show off secure VoIP calls by using a single virtual machine for the VoIP client to run on. The same technology could in theory be used to isolate any process meaning that malware won't be able to run riot on your device.

As mobile applications get more entrenched into phones, technologies such as the OKL hypervisor should mean we can avoid the draconian crippled functionality that the Iphone OS provides and allow developers greater freedom without giving them the run of devices should code go awry. µ