The Cost of Transparency

Whatever application software is loaded into a handset, it generally comes at a cost.
This is actually a major issue in digital cellular handset economics: Hardware designers
are given a target, for example, to reduce GSM hardware component costs (the bill
of materials) to $40 per handset. Suddenly, the software team announces that their chosen
application layer OS will add $10 of licensing cost to each handset. Remember that
the hardware component cost includes a material cost, so the hardware margin would
be no more than $10. Half the added value of the handset has suddenly moved into
software-added value.
The open code software proposed by Linux provides one solution to this. Allowing
lots of different design inputs often has the beneficial effect of increasing the application
bandwidth. The software can do a wider range of tasks, but this comes at a cost—
additional memory and processor footprint.
From an application performance perspective, you would have an operating system
that would provide time transparency, platform transparency, task transparency, I/O
transparency, and code transparency, but the code and processor overheads would be
unsupportable in a portable device.