New Member Spotlight: Aava Mobile Goes All Open

We announced just last week that Aava Mobile has become a member of The Linux Foundation. Its involvement in Linux and open source development represents the growing number of telecommunications companies and organizations contributing to Linux. Aava Mobile claims the world’s first fully open mobile device, so naturally we wanted to know more. Here is our Q&A with Aava Mobile CTO Tero Nygard…

Aava Mobile launched its reference design this year at Mobile World Congress. Can you tell us a little about the company and its products?

Nygard: Aava Mobile was founded in 2009 by a team of engineering wizards with a strong background in mobile phone development who wanted to build an open source mobile device platform for the OEM/ODM market. Aava Mobile’s open devices harness the creativity of developer communities and provide the flexibility to OEMs/ODMs and mobile operators to incorporate their own user interface, content and services to differentiate their devices from competitors.
 
The company is touted as the world’s first open mobile device. Can you tell us more about that?

Nygard: There is so much creativity that can be harnessed when you free yourself from the confines of a proprietary design and give developer communities an open platform and some tools to play with, so Aava Mobile saw an opportunity to make an entirely open mobile device. We are open on the hardware side with our standardized I/O ports and the ecosystem of peripheral docking devices that openness encourages, and we are open on the software side with our MeeGo and Android operating systems.
 
Aava Mobile is based on Intel’s Atom platform. How is Atom enabling you to serve your OEM and operator customers?

Nygard: Intel’s x86 offering is fitting our customers’ needs very well. We strongly believe in the Atom offering, which in our opinion, thanks to its unique performance and power management, will play a significant role in the mobile market by supporting many kinds of mobile devices.
 
How can developers get involved in Aava Mobile development? Are you seeing a lot of community involvement?

Nygard: As announced during the summer, we will support developers in a unique way by giving them the ability to acquire fully functional Aava Mobile smartphones. This enables developers to develop applications and improve MeeGo using fully functional products with all communication and UI components enabled. Our first round of pre-orders was extremely successful and we were not able to fulfill all requests. But please visit our web page in Q1 201, because we will be ready for more developers.
 
What’s your general take on the mobile Linux market today? What are the challenges to advancement? What are the opportunities?

Nygard: A clear challenge is the balance between openness and controlling the roadmap and features. It is essential for companies like Aava to have a software stack which is not only open, but also provides good feature completeness and enables planning of future products.