[iBook] The iPhone: Touchscreen interface, runs Mac OS X, ships in June (Keynote notes)

[Angus Wallace]

A friend of mine has a 'pocketPC.' It came with WindowsCE on it, but he has
removed that and installed Linux.

Less than a few percent of the code is different, in the Linux core. The main
thing that is different is that the GUI (graphical interface) is cut-down.
Now you might call that Linux-lite, but I think that's disingenious - any Linux
program can be recompiled (_easily_) to run on his pocketPC.

The Whole thing fits in about 200mb of memory on this thing, and it has a 400Mhz
Intel XScale processor (I think), which is similar to the iPhone.

Back to OSX - there's no technical reason why Apple couldn't be running OSX on
the iPhone - with a simpler GUI perhaps (i.e. you might not have the dock,
overlapping windows, etc), but I don't see why they couldn't release a
developer kit to allow (for example) programs like Skype, Microsoft Office,
various games, iTunes, Mail, Doom, Entourage, p2p software, gimp, photoshop,
and all others, to run natively.

But - there are a few non-technical reasons why this may not be the case. (i.e.
phone service providers currently make profits by locking the phones down, and
this could be hard to change)

As I said in a previous email: this is a computer - not a phone. If it's an open
platform, it's going to be awesome. The possibilities are huge. If it's closed,
it'll be a damn shame, but will still be very good.

In any case, I'm sure Linux will run on it ;-)

-Gus