Harvesting the Benefits of the HME Reducing Complexity Decreasing Cost and Time to Market Decreasing Platform Fragmentation Reducing Complexity The HME was specifically designed to combat the increasing complexity required to bring modern operating systems to mobile handsets. Inverting the traditional OS practice of designing a porting layer for each OS from the OS down to the device, the HME implements an abstraction of the handset platform that can be exposed to many different operating systems. Such a system partitioning allows the handset platform designer to concentrate on developing software for those capabilities that are exposed on the handset independently of the operating system that will ultimately be deployed on the device, significantly decreasing the complexity of the overall system being designed. Using the HME, the handset can be designed, debugged and put through significant system test independent of the operating system that will be deployed on the device. This reduces the complexity of the implementation, integration and system test of the handset. ^ Return to top Decreasing Cost and Time to Market As complexity is reduced so is cost. An operating system and its boot loader that has been instrumented to use the HME can be brought up on a handset that implements the HME in much less time than it would traditionally take to port an operating system to a new device. Most of the operating system testing will have already been executed prior to system integration. In addition to this, because of the HME configuration features, its services for the operating systems boot loader, and its virtual hardware interface to the operating system (replacing the actual hardware interface), new platforms can be brought up using existing binary images of a complete operating system and its associated applications. This brings unprecedented cost and time to market advantages to systems that have been implemented with HME. ^ Return to top Decreasing Platform Fragmentation One of the biggest problems that the mobile industry is facing today is the costs associated with bringing applications to market due to incompatibilities of underlying handset operating system and application environment. Utilizing the HME, whole families of handsets can use the same underlying binaries for all but the lowest level software on the device, providing a unique advantage in application and OS interoperability. ^ Return to top | Return to Overview