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[20090201]
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Sidekick LX 2009 to use NetBSD as native operating system
There's news on
Boygeniousreport,
Hiptop3, and
Engadget
that the Sidekick LX 2009 will use NetBSD as native operating system.
What's a Sidekick? Wikipedia knows that
``The Danger Hiptop, also re-branded as the
T-Mobile Sidekick,
is a luxury GPRS/EDGE smartphone manufactured by Danger Incorporated. ''
See the image on the right for more details and features.
After Danger was bought by Microsoft in 2008, one would expect that
their upcoming models will run Microsoft's embedded operating system
Windows CE as operating system. Apparrently that's not the case, and
the new Sidekick will rather run NetBSD as operating system.
It seems Danger did too much work that they didn't want to throw
away. :-)
So where's the actual news from on those websites?
Besides some "internal sources", there were some job posts
by Microsoft seeking a NetBSD programmer in
several
places.
I guess we'll have to wait for the final product to hit the store to
confirm this, unless we get hold of someone at Danger^WMicrosoft to
tell us what's going on. Nevertheless, NetBSD and its BSD license can
be used fine in a commercial product like the Sidekick, it gives
the company full protection of investment.
I guess when time comes by, we (NetBSD) will see how we can
cooperate to support development and code maintenance, and also
get the word out about another major company using NetBSD.
[Tags: danger, embedded, microsoft, Products, sidekick]
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