Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Virtualization coming to smartphones

This just seems very, very cool

I have two HUGE questions, though.  For SIM-based phones, where the SIM card identifies the device on the network, how in the world do you handle that?  I can envision some mechanism in the hypervisor that effectively lets one SIM card support two phones, similar to MAC address spoofing in VMs today.  The bigger question for me is radio contention.  If the personal instance is on a call, how in the world does it handle notification of a call on the work instance?   My initial thought there is that the hypervisor itself actually controls the radio, and spoofs both the physical and virtual phone instances into seeing it as a call-waiting event somehow.

Regardless of how they've done it, it's a great idea.  I know my office does not allow personal smartphones to be connected to email and other work resources because of the security issues.  However, if they could install a virtual phone on my personal phone, that the office had complete control over, that would be a different story.  And there is then the benefit of only having to carry one device or handset.  This seems a win-win all the way around, as long as there is an absolute wall between the host and the virtual machine.

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