The Nirvana Phone goes beyond traditional smart phones by allowing users to access their corporate virtual desktop and applications from a single device, in any location (Fig. 2). With support for docking to full-sized displays, keyboards, mice, and other PC-type peripherals, Nirvana Phones will offer mobile workers a complete “virtual desktop in their pocket,” permitting them to take their desktop anywhere without the need to carry around a full laptop.

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The jointly developed reference architecture for the Nirvana Phone can be viewed at www.ok-labs.com/whitepapers/sample/the-nirvanaphone-concept-spec-and-reference-architeture.

Conclusion

Despite obvious similarities between enterprise/desktop virtualization and its mobile counterpart, mobile phone use cases present key differences: smaller memory capacities demand slimmer embedded hypervisor footprints, current mobile processors lack virtualization support in hardware requiring para-virtualization, and hosted guest software spans the gamut from enterprise OSs to embedded RTOSs to standalone device drivers.

The mobile industry is just beginning to exploit advantages made possible by virtualization. Cost reduction, flexibility, security, power management, and end-user experience are all driving adoption of this technology. Virtualization confers a range of benefits upon mobile and embedded applications, with minimal or zero impact on resources and performance.

Mobile virtualization builds in security, helps increase return on investment (ROI) through the reuse of existing software, and lets handset OEMs consolidate hardware costs by enabling multiple OSs to run on a single-core processor. In addition, like its enterprise counterpart, mobile virtualization may soon become the “de facto” standard by which all other mobile developments are judged.