Software to enable P2T terminals

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Feb 25, 2004

ModeLabs and Open-Plug have entered into an agreement to provide a range of wireless terminals supporting push-to-talk (P2T).

ModeLabs and Open-Plug have entered into an agreement to provide a range of wireless terminals supporting push-to-talk (P2T).

The two companies decided to combine their intellectual property and technology to address the growing need for network operators to rapidly deploy turnkey value-added solutions.

Under the agreement, operator specific implementations of P2T based terminals will be developed and sold under operator's brand name or ModeLabs own brand.

ModeLabs' solutions address the operator's need for new service deployment, from the business evaluation phase to market deployment including handset specification, engineering and supply channel management.

The offering is based on Open-Plug's Linux-FlexibleWare which enables easy and rapid integration and deployment of customised terminals on the market.

In addition, Open-Plug's technology enables field-upgrades of any part of the terminal software.

"ModeLabs is addressing a real market need by helping operators to quickly deploy customised value-added services like P2T with a complete solution including terminals", said Eric Baissus, CEO of Open-Plug.

He added: "Network operators are demanding more responsiveness from the wireless terminal industry.

We are proud to be part of ModeLabs and the unique market proposition that it offers.

The FlexibleWare technology benefits in terms of market responsiveness and flexibility for customisation are maximised".

"The mobile terminal industry has tremendous bottlenecks in the rapid supply of phones supporting new services like P2T.

ModeLabs objective is to overcome them and provide operators with a complete solution, including a phone offering tailored to their needs", said Henri-Nicolas Olivier of ModeLabs, "Time to market, customisation flexibility, service deployment and maintenance/evolution through over-the-air updates are key differentiators for us, Open-Plug's Linux FlexibleWare offering provides these features in an easy to deploy, safe and nonintrusive way".

The Linux FlexibleWare suite from Open-Plug opens proprietary wireless modem platforms to the Linux developer community without any tradeoff in term of cost and robustness.

It consists of the FlexibleWare tool suite and the FlexibleWare framework (a small embedded engine running on the mobile phone).

The tool suite includes a software development kit (SDK) for software developers, that can be plugged to existing developer IDE and which analyses any Linux-based codes and transforms them into optimised easy-to-integrate isolated software components.

The embedded framework is in charge of managing the so-generated software components in a highly optimised way, when installed on the terminal.

The framework does not require any specific modifications and can be implemented on any terminal platform in a few weeks.