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LiMo Foundation launches Linux Android rival
Goal: Common mobile platform…

By Tom Krazit

Published: Monday 31 March 2008

Google's Android may get all the attention, but there's more than one industry consortium working to unify Linux development for mobile phones.

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The not-for-profit LiMo Foundation plans to announce the launch of LiMo Platform Release 1 at the CTIA show in Las Vegas today. Release 1 gives handset makers and carriers the basic operating system software needed to run a phone, leaving it up to them to install a user interface and applications on top.

Andrew Shikiar, director of global marketing for the LiMo Foundation, said: "This is a significant achievement for LiMo in that we now have a complete fully released version of the platform that our members are free to distribute."

More than 30 mobile-phone companies are members of LiMo, including heavyweights Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Vodafone and newest member Texas Instruments.

There's no shortage of interest among the mobile-phone industry elite in using Linux on their phones. Linux provides a compelling alternative for the mobile world to commercial operating systems like Symbian or Windows Mobile as it is cheaper. Also, its modular nature allows handset makers and carriers to put together an implementation that makes the most sense for their customers or geography.

However, that's also part of the problem with mobile Linux. All those different implementations of Linux force application developers to tweak their programs for each different implementation. The resulting fragmentation has limited Linux to lower-end mobile phones, with the higher-end smart phone development community largely organised around Symbian, Windows Mobile, RIM's BlackBerry and Apple's growing iPhone business.

The LiMo Foundation's goal, therefore, is to produce a common platform that various members can use to run mobile phones, and ensure application compatibility across different devices.

But Release 1 isn't quite there yet. Broader application portability will be accomplished with Release 2, expected out in early 2009, Shikiar said. The second release will also improve the multimedia capabilities of the operating system. By then, however, the 'Google Effect' will have made its first impact on the mobile phone market.

Android, and the Open Handset Alliance created by Google last year, have very much the same goal as LiMo: to unify Linux development for mobile phones. Google boasts a roster of many of the same companies that founded the LiMo Foundation just months before Android made its debut, perhaps a hint those companies have now set their sights elsewhere for Linux mobile-phone software.