The bane of the cell phone industry is that its software needs to be rewritten for every new model. And since new cell phones come along about as often as, ah, cell phone commercials on TV, that's a problem. The answer is virtualization -- break the dependence on hardware of a piece of software written for a particular device.VMware was by no means the first to implement virtualization. But it understood ahead of others that virtualization would benefit the low end of the server market based on Intel's x86 instruction set. Now it's testing its ability to virtualize an even bigger mass market, the one for mobile phones.

There were 2.9 billion chips produced last year based on the Advanced Risc Machine or ARM designs. VMware proposes to virtualize the high end of this market so that applications developed for Samsung can run on Motorola devices as well. In theory, they'll run on the Apple iPhone and RIM BlackBerry and Ericsson cell phones as well.

VMware has come up with a 20-30K hypervisor -- one that sips memory rather than guzzles it. The mobile hypervisor slips in between a cell phone application and the mobile device CPU, intercepting instructions from above and recasting them to meet the bare metal needs of the device below. Most cell phones are based on a common underlying ARM chipset design.

Specifically, VMware's Mobile Virtualization Platform will virtualize the instruction set for all processors based on the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 designs. Gartner analysts estimate that half of the smart phones shipped in 2012 will run virtualized software.

Virtualization is going to give cell phone application developers added impetus to produce for the "open" operating systems powering mobile devices, including Symbian, Linux, and Windows CE. These operating systems will be driving some of the most competitive devices. In effect, cell phone applications will become virtual appliances. They will be bundled with a stripped down, optimized version of its chosen operating system, then downloaded to run on a variety of smart phone handsets, ignoring the previous hard boundary between manufacturers and operating systems. The virtualization layer is able to rationalize away these differences.

VMware is basing its virtualization layer that accomplishes this on technology it acquired in October but did not announce publicly until yesterday. The acquisition was Trango Virtual Processors, founded in 2004 in Grenoble, France.