A good source for background and high-level technical issues in mobile virtualization, this brief book presents the existing virtualization techniques on mobile systems, including Symbian, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and other mobile devices. As smartphones and tablets are growing more and more popular, people tend to use the same phone or tablet for both work and personal use. This book describes a number of existing virtualization techniques to achieve the goal of separating work use and personal use on the same mobile device.

Chapter 1 first motivates the use of virtualization technology in mobile systems, and then chapter 2 discusses several such virtualization techniques (BlackBerry Balance, KVM on ARM, Xen on ARM, OKL4 Microvisor, Divide by Enterproid, TrustDroid, and so on), which are categorized in three types: mobile device policy, mobile hypervisor, and mobile container. Chapter 3 uses a set of attributes to compare the example techniques of the three types, and gives a comparison report. Chapter 4 presents a study of how users like different types of techniques, and chapter 5 proposes an architecture that the authors believe is novel and addresses most problems in the mobile container type of solution. In chapter 6, the authors evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture and compare it with the performances of several existing techniques to show that the proposed architecture has performance advantages. The book ends with conclusions and future work in chapter 7.

Basically, this book provides a high-level and relatively comprehensive overview of mobile virtualization technology. This overview includes a description of the existing mobile virtualization techniques on the market, important attributes of mobile virtualization technology from the user’s point of view, users’ preferences among different techniques, and basic architectural problems to be addressed in mobile virtualization. Moreover, the book presents a performance evaluation of the techniques and conveys to readers a concept of how much overhead different types of mobile virtualization techniques incur.

The book’s descriptions and discussions are high level; it doe not provide an in-depth or low-level technical presentation or discussion. So, if you want an up-to-date, broad view of how virtualization technology is currently used in mobile devices and what problems the technology addresses, this book is the right option. However, if you already have background knowledge of mobile virtualization and your goal is to develop a mobile virtualization solution or study a specific low-level technical problem, this book does not provide the information you are looking for.

In general, it is easy to read, though there are some minor broken sentences and paragraphs (due to careless typesetting). Considering that the use of virtualization in mobile systems is a very new area in information technology, this book is a good source for background and high-level technical issues. For scientists, researchers, and technicians unfamiliar with virtualization technology in mobile systems, this book is a good start before diving into more advanced and in-depth books and articles. Finally, if you are just curious about the up-to-date advancement of technology, this book is the right choice.