Saturday, November 1, 2014

Research Note: KDE on Mobile

One evening, when endeavoring to develop an idea of what I might be able to expect if I was to transition from an iPhone to an Android Phone, I had read that the default email application on the Anrdoid OS is lacking some features [Purty2011]. More recently, on reading about the Season of KDE 2014 Student Programs, I found myself inquiring of whether there may be any projects for implementing the KDE PIM suite -- as would be, instead of on a Linux desktop -- on a mobile phone platform, in so many human-computer interface revisions and architecture revisions as might be developed of such a port for the KDE PIM applications.

On researching my own question, I found a few projects. One of those projects, Plasma Activehas implemented Kontact on a mobile platform [PlasmaActive]. Another of those projects, Mer Project, represents an architecture for Qt applications on a mobile platform. [MerProject]

One might observe, candidly, that at this time, neither project project has published a list of vendors implementing their respective platforms. Perhaps, one might think it could seem hopeful, in a sense, regardless.

Insofar as whether the Mer Project may be anyhow forked, perhaps, to be extended and/or revised for implementation onto a baseline Anrdoid operating system -- considering Anrdoid's broad support base, both in vendor implementations and in software development projects, in the consumer market, -- globally so, as that even Rostec's YotaPhone runs Anrdoid [Martin2014] -- perhaps it may be fortuitous, to focus on the Anrdoid platform as it being an existing, by in large open platform for mobile devices. Android, after all, is based on the Linux kernel. [Lynch2013] certainly insofar as would be extended by Google, in development of the baseline Android platform -- but insofar as to fork the Mer Project? If one has only read about the Mer project, this weekend, and one has not a really well-developed object model, in place, for application of C and C++ toolchains, one might wonder if perhaps it may be worth a short note, however, as with regards to KDE on Mobile.

Thus, here's a research note, in such technical regards.


[Purty2011] Purdy, Kevin. K-9 Mail is What Anrdoid's IMAP Email App Should Be. Lifehacker. 2011
[KDECommunity2014] KDE Community. Season of KDE deadlines extended!. Twitter stream object.
[PlasmaActive] Plasma Active. Plasma Active. web site.
[MerProject] Mer Project. Mer Project. web site.
[Martin2014] Martin, Chris. YotaPhone 2 hands-on review: Dual-screen Android smartphone gets better. Tech Advisor. 2014
[Lynch2013] Lynch, Jim. Is Android really a Linux distribution? IT World. 2014

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