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| Intrinsyc Announces Commercial Availability of Soleus Intrinsyc Software International, Inc. has announced the commercial availability of Soleus. Soleus, first demonstrated at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France, February 2005, under the code name Polaris, is a turnkey development platform for feature phones that leverages the Microsoft Windows CE operating system to create software that provides mobile phone manufacturers with more cost-effective and feature-laden handset design options. Soleus provides a broad range of telephony essentials, and also includes a suite of the most popular voice and data applications. Soleus offers a primary solution for operators and handset manufacturers looking to: 1. Quickly develop and bring to market feature phones 2. Provide rich, differentiated user experiences 3. Reduce development time and cost Soleus is designed to provide: 1. Rapid, evolving innovation on the mobile handset 2. A level of flexibility not supported by legacy RTOS (Real Time Operating Systems)-based development systems 3. Functionality to reduce bug-fix cycles and certification timelines Handset manufacturers that deploy Soleus have access to Intrinsyc's value-added professional engineering services to support every aspect of product design, development and service. Intrinsyc provides out-of-the-box support with top-notch application development tools including Platform Builder and Microsoft Visual Studio. Wireless operators are excited about Soleus because it will allow them to quickly and easily penetrate new market segments, lower their handset costs, allow them to customize handsets, promote initiations and shorten certification timelines. Soleus provides the wireless industry with a dynamic off-the-shelf solution to meet demanding time-to-market requirements of wireless operators, and the insatiable hunger for innovation by mobile handset users. Soleus is pre-ported to leading hardware platforms, provides a rich application suite that includes industry-leading, pre-integrated third-party applications, and delivers the ability for rapid customization of both the feature set and the mobile handset user interface (UI). Simply put, Soleus provides the strength of Microsoft's Windows CE 5.0, the flexibility of the Soleus UX Designer plug-in, enabling unique graphic UI (GUI) development, and a smaller hardware and memory footprint. The Soleus foundation is built on Microsoft's Windows CE 5.0. This sidesteps the less-nimble and resource-heavy requirements of the RTOS, which historically required more time for manufacturers to respond and innovate to wireless operator requests to customize the handset features or UI. With Windows CE 5.0, Soleus is able to rely on a rich, industry-tested architecture and world-class toolset to solve a myriad of problems, and is fully able to build software platforms for a wide range of wireless devices, not just handsets or media players. Two Windows CE 5.0 tools in particular play an important role for Soleus: - Windows CE Platform Builder, which provides drag-and-drop support for fast operating system configuration. In its feature phone platform, Intrinsyc extends Platform Builder with its components, design templates, and test support. - Microsoft Visual Studio 2005/UX Designer plug-in: In the latest version of Microsoft's award-winning suite for building applications, Intrinsyc extends Visual Studio with its UX Designer plug-in, making Soleus fully customizable and easy to implement to build a unique user interface. A rich set of phone controls, along with the Soleus UI framework, sets the stage for productive mobile phone application software, source-level debugging, and productive software developers. These tools make the Soleus platform fully customizable. With its UI framework and UX Designer tool, Soleus provides carriers with full control over the customization and branding of the mobile handset man-machine interface. Through the world-class Platform Builder configuration tool, Soleus provides handset manufacturers with full control over software configuration. Manufacturers can experiment by mixing and matching different features. This works, with a minimum of side effects, because everything in the platform is pre-integrated. At the heart of the Soleus platform is a rich, capable set of mobile phone applications. As part of the Soleus UI framework, the UI for these applications can be quickly tailored to support specific market segments, end-user demographics, or other market requirements. A rich mobile phone Application Programming Interface (API) enables easy integration between applications, by exposing all mobile phone services to every application. A partial list of the applications includes alarm, calculator, calendar, call history, camera, contacts, dialer, file manager, media player, and phone settings. In addition to these built-in applications, Intrinsyc has partnered with a select set of third-party independent software vendors who have built best-of-breed applications in several key categories. Through its ISV partners, Intrinsyc provides the following set of pre-integrated applications to its feature phone customers: Java virtual machine (MIDP 2.0), Email (POP/SMTP), SMS, MMS, Browser (WAP 2.0 / XHTML), and Instant Messaging. (For a current list of available third-party application partners, visit the Intrinsyc web site.) With Windows CE, Soleus is free to add in its own components and, under Microsoft's flexible licensing, can also make changes to the Windows CE source code and kernel. The Soleus kernel is roughly one-third the size of the off-the-shelf Windows CE version, offering a reduction in memory footprint. Workable Soleus handsets can be competitively built using a 100MHz CPU and 12MB ROM/12MB RAM memory footprint. Additionally, Soleus can deliver a smaller hardware footprint than other handsets offering similar services by allowing a reduced BOM cost, leveraging Intrinsyc's power-management experience, using the ARM 926 sCPU design, and by the efficient support of tri-core designs, all giving manufacturers a more competitive marketplace edge. Soleus' simple architecture will appeal to handset manufacturers while its user interface customizability adds appeal for mobile operators. Soleus is not intended to be open - in the sense of offering a platform that enables end users to install additional native applications after they have purchased their device. More importantly its Windows CE core makes it relatively straightforward to port existing Windows Mobile applications to the platform for embedding at build time, or to build new ones. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Computing News :: home page |