The mobile internet device (MID) market is shaping up as a very promising greenfield opportunity for mobile operating system vendors to find new outlets for their products, according to ABI Research. Linux will be an important part of this market from the start and will be championed by solutions such as Moblin and Maemo, the firm stated. ABI Research expects that by 2013, 86 million Linux-enabled MID products will ship per annum, with Moblin taking 42% of the market.
According to vice president Stuart Carlaw: “Although custom designed solutions such as Moblin and Maemo will take large shares in the MID market, there will also be opportunities for LiMo as well as PC-based Linux OSs.”
He went on: “The essential message here is that there is room for multiple success stories. One of the chief reasons for the projected growth of Moblin is that the tight alignment between hardware and software will be an incredibly important factor in this market. Moblin’s market share will be tightly aligned to the share of the market that Intel’s Atom solution gains.”