Unix as Mobile Operating System
Mobile Operating System is getting really high hype these days. The competitions between smartphone vendors such as Apple, Google, and Blackberry to deliver the best OS for their customers is really fierce. Therefore, Mobile Operating System plays an important role on smartphone market. Interestingly, those OSes are unix, unix-like, ore somehow has connection to Unix directly or indirectly.
Apple iOS - by Apple
This operating system powers millions of devices produced by Apple; iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Formerly known as iPhone OS, but recently it's renamed to iOS to match Apple naming scheme. The OS is unix-like OS, similar to Mac OS X, but optimized for embedded devices running on ARM architecture. The origin of the OS can be traced to NextStep/OpenStep that inherit code from FreeBSD and NetBSD project. The OS has compatibility with POSIX in several of their components (threading, socket, etc). You can easily call POSIX API from Cocoa Touch App.
This operating system is controversial one. It uses linux kernel optimized for ARM architecture, yet it just doesn't support full POSIX on its bionic C runtime, such as C++ exceptions. It uses Linux Kernel but not using its userland tools. Applications runs on Dalvik, and native apps cannot run by itself and should be imported to dalvik API call to be able to be used by Apps. Thus, it's hard to classify the Operating System is Unix POSIX or not. Nevertheless, it has origin of Linux which is known as Unix-like operating system. It's not genetic though.
QNX is well known on embedded device development as a commercial Unix-Like operating system that uses Microkernel architecture. Now it's owned by Blackberry. Blackberry OS 7 will be based on QNX. QNX is compatible with most of POSIX standard. Compatibility with POSIX standard make porting native code from other unix/unix like operating system such as FreeBSD, OSX, and Linux to QNX easier.
MeeGo - by Nokia
Unlike android, MeeGo runs on top of Embedded Linux distributions. Thus, MeeGo can be considered as a Linux distro for Embedded Devices such as Mobile Phone, Tablet, and set-top-boxes. The GUI is based on Qt. Since MeeGo is a Linux distro, the Operating System can be classified as Unix-Like Operating System.
WebOS - by Palm (now HP)
The same as MeeGo. WebOS is a form of commercial/proprietary distro of Linux. It uses libC, GStreamer, libpurple, and other libraries typically used on Desktop Linux. The uses on Linux classifies this OS by Palm is a unix-like operating system.
It's really interesting to see the competitions and development between mobile operating systems. From the list above we can say that the existence of Linux, made by it's Benevolent Dictator For Life, Linus Torvalds, really benefitting mobile os developers and foster the innovation of Mobile Operating System.
