Mobile Operating System

A mobile operating system (or mobile OS) is an operating system for smartphones, tablets, PDAs, or other mobile devices. While computers such as the typicallaptop are mobile, the operating systems usually used on them are not considered mobile ones as they were originally designed for bigger stationary desktop computers that historically did not have or need specific "mobile" features. This distinction is getting blurred in some newer operating systems that are hybrids made for both uses.

Mobile operating systems combine features of a personal computer operating system with other features useful for mobile or handheld use; usually including, and most of the following considered essential in modern mobile systems; a touchscreen, cellular, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS mobile navigation, camera, video camera,speech recognition, voice recorder, music player, near field communication and infrared blaster.

Mobile devices with mobile communications capabilities (e.g. smartphones) contain two mobile operating systems – the main user-facing software platform is supplemented by a second low-level proprietary real-time operating system which operates the radio and other hardware. Research has shown that these low-level systems may contain a range of security vulnerabilities permitting malicious base stations to gain high levels of control over the mobile device.

Android

Android (based on the Linux kernel) is from Google Inc. Besides having the largest installed base worldwide on smartphones, it is also the most popular operating system for general purpose computers (a category that includes desktop computers as well as mobile devices), even though Android is not a popular operating system for regular ("desktop") PCs. Although the Android operating system is free and open-source software, in actual devices, much of the software bundledwith it (including Google apps and vendor-installed software) is proprietary and closed source.

Android's releases prior to 2.0 (1.0, 1.5, 1.6) were used exclusively on mobile phones. Android 2.x releases were mostly used for mobile phones but also some tablets. Android 3.0 was a tablet-oriented release and does not officially run on mobile phones. The current Android version is 6.0.