LG will soon begin selling its first smartphones loaded with Horizon Mobile, a VMware technology that splits a device's workspace into sandboxed personal and business partitions and makes them accessible via the tap of a button.
In a presentation Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, LG said its carrier partners Verizon and Telefonica will be launching Horizon Mobile-equipped smartphones "in the coming months." LG is showing how Horizon Mobile works on its new Revolution VS910 smartphone this week at CES.
First unveiled at last year's Mobile World Congress, and launched at VMware 2011, Horizon Mobile is designed to allow employees to carry a single device for work and play. It walls off the business part of a phone within an Android virtual machine and includes advanced management features that enable IT to remotely provision and de-provision devices as needed.
Samsung also is working on bringing Horizon Mobile to its Galaxy S II smartphones and its Galaxy Tab 10.1 and 8.9 tablets, but there is no word yet on when these might hit the market.
Horizon Mobile is based on VMware's Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), which VMware showed off at the Mobile World Congress last February.
Many organizations are using virtualization to provide their employees with access to Windows applications on tablets or thin clients, but VMware sees Horizon Mobile as a potentially important driver for what it's fond of calling "the post-PC era." The company is confident that virtualization can solve problems stemming from consumerization in the same way it's solved issues in the data center.
"We see the notion of a dual persona, where IT has control of their world, as something that people are really interested in," VMware CTO Stephen Herrod said last September.
