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OK-Labs puts two phones into each device. Or three. Or...

Mobile Virtualisation: it means "running two or several platforms on the same mobile device. At the same time. "You surely aren't saying that my mobile phone will run both Android AND Symbian at the same time?" we asked the man from OK-Labs, who is in London selling virtualisation this week. "Why not?" replied Karry Kleeman, VP of worldwide sales.

First reactions to such innovation are often sceptical. The first time someone tried this on PCs, everybody laughed, and PC Week said it was a solution in search of a problem.

But VM Labs created VMWare around a decade ago, allowing people to put extra memory into the box, and then run Windows and Linux and Mac simultaneously, switching from one to the other if needed. They even let you run two, three, four or more copies of Windows at the same time; if your software crashed in one virtual machine, you could just close that virtual machine down, and carry on developing in another, no need to reboot.

Now, OK Labs reckons it is the world leader in "mobile virtualisation" and that in a short time, we'll be able to have it all on our phones.

If, for example, the best way of running communications is through a BREW application (normally, exclusive to Qualcomm-based phones) but the best phone directory is an Android package, then you'll have them both. Users may never even know, or need to know.

This isn't a futurist product. "We're already selling software to allow our clients to build these phones," Kleeman told NewsWireless this week.

And the weird arrangement we asked about is not weird at all. "Android and Symbian will be a very natural combination on the same phone," Kleeman said.

"We are working with a major mobile network operator, a carrier in the Japanese market; they have a legacy application, and they want it to work on a new Android machine. But that old app is all built on Symbian. And at the same time, they want to add a third component, a secure financial gateway, so that it can be used to make mobile payments."

This is a developer product. The details of how it works probably won't even slightly interest the typical gadget freak. But Kleeman assures us that his company has sold this software to clients.

"It is running on over 500 million phones already," he said. And work they are doing with Qualcomm and ST Ericsson (no, NOT Sony Ericsson!) means you'll have something in your hand like this within the year – and you'll probably never even know.

Won't this make the phone a bit cramped? Won't we need extra RAM? No - apparently the bit that is hard to grasp is that cramming two platforms into one phone may actually make the phone cheaper.

Qualcomm comes up a lot in conversation, because it has apparently funded much of OK-Labs research Kleeman described one project where the ability to use the main phone chip to run Qualcomm BREW in the background for communications saved the builder around $42 in parts and materials, because they didn't need a separate comms chip.

If you feel up to reading pretty technical explanations, you can download a White Paper (PDF)which describes a job OK Labs did for Motorola on an Evoke-based phone, before Moto switched to Android. Don't feel you have to, though!

This is very good news for anybody doing open source development. That specifically means Android, and it means Symbian. OK-Labs does support other phone OS platforms, but they may not benefit as much. Phones using either of those open source platforms, however, will be able to build new facilities into their boxes even if the feature isn't normally available except on BREW, Kleeman says.

You may not all have to switch to iPhones, after all…