VmwareMvp
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Work, play on a single phone: LG teams up with VMware to deploy Android handsets with virtualization
VMware has been chatting up seamless, sexy virtualization among multiple operating systems on a single smartphone for some time -- and it's finally getting the opportunity to deliver en masse thanks to a new partnership with LG. Targeted at the enterprise, Korea's number two phone maker -- which is going into 2011 with a big Android push -- will be integrating VMware's virtualization technology into some of its models next year, starting with Android but potentially moving to other platforms (Windows Phone 7 comes immediately to mind) if the market demands it. You might think that being able to virtualize a second operating system on your phone doesn't have much consumer relevance, but VMware's got a point: with smartphones becoming more of an end-user phenomenon than ever before, it's getting tougher for IT departments to sell employees on giving up their personal phones in favor of a secure, managed, corporate-provided alternative. With the virtualized setup, the work phone lives as an app within the personal phone -- two phone numbers, two complete environments, and only the work environment can be controlled by the IT nerds. Long term, the concept would be that employees could use whatever phone their little hearts desire -- companies would merely need to dump their VMware setup on top and you've suddenly got your work phone integrated. Follow the break for the press release and a video demo of VMware's virtualization software (on a Nexus One, not an LG) in action.
VMware MVP weds Windows CE and Android in unholy matrimony on dual-boot N800
This is just too good. We knew VMware was working on this sort of thing, but watching it in action is almost too much magic for our fragile hearts to comprehend. VMware MVP lets you run multiple mobile operating systems on a mobile device as virtual machines. It works exactly as you might hope something like this to work -- you can switch between operating systems on the fly, with full graphics acceleration and touchscreen interaction. You can even view both operating systems running simultaneously (in this case Windows CE 6 and Android), with info on just how much power each OS is swiping from your poor little mobile CPU. Performance isn't perfect, of course, but as mobile hardware gets better and the desire for multiple mobile operating systems on the same device becomes unbearable, we see good things happening here. VMware expects to release the software in 2009, video is after the break.
