Trolltech, Huawei join mobile Linux group
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InfoWorld - The LiMo Foundation has added some members to its ranks as competition among new mobile Linux platforms heats up.
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The first "open" Linux phone is set to debut at the Consumer Electronics Show, although its capabilities as a music player are still unknown. In Listening Post.
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Operators and manufacturers to collaborate on next-gen mobile phone platform.
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FRANKFURT, GERMANY -- After launching two of the world's first Linux smart phones, China's E28 Ltd. is now offering handset manufacturers the opportunity to license its software and hardware designs based on the increasingly popular open-source operating system.
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The LiMo Foundation plans to release the first version of its Linux software platform for mobile phones in March, with handsets running the software due soon.LiMo&#39;s goal is to offer handset manufacturers an open, hardware-independent software platform that offers a secure environment for downloadable applications.Publishing the code on time is one thing, but &quot;putting handsets into consumers&#39; hands is the most important proof point,&quot; said Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation. That will happen very soon, he said.On Monday, the Foundation will publish a beta version of the software&#39;s APIs (application programming interfaces) so that developers can begin writing applications to run on it.The APIs are still beta versions because the underlying software is not yet complete and minor details may change ahead of its release in March, Gillis said.The LiMo Foundation is focusing on phones&#39; middleware, leaving handset manufacturers and operators to choose their own user interface and content applications.That freedom is important, Gillis said, because &quot;the cost of developing the first phone on a platform can be as high as half a billion dollars.&quot;Phone manufacturers may be unwilling to make that kind of commitment to a new operating system if it will also leave them tied to another company&#39;s user interface or content applications, he said.&quot;That&#39;s why Windows Mobile and Series 60 didn&#39;t gain broad traction; suppliers didn&#39;t feel comfortable,&quot; he said.LiMo faces competition from another open platform,&#160;Android, supported by Google&#160;and the Open Handset Alliance.For Gillis, the connection between Android and Google&#39;s content make that another example of a tied operating system.Although the LiMo Foundation&#39;s code is not quite finished, most of it has already been proven in handsets sold or distributed by founder members Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone, Gillis said.Nevertheless, there are some new elements, notably the security model, Gillis said. &quot;Security in handsets is an area that tends to evolve quite quickly,&quot; he said.Since development of the platform began, &quot;there are no major new threats, but it&#39;s about evolving approaches and algorithms that address the security situation.&quot;Although the underlying platform is open, the handsets based on it may not be. The LiMo code includes support for application signing, allowing handset designers or operators to block the execution of unsigned downloads.&quot;The precise rules used for application signing are usually determined by the operator,&quot; Gillis said.However, he said, there are signs that operators are moving away from the &quot;walled garden&quot; they favored in the past to a more open approach.
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(InfoWorld) - Trolltech is offering a suite of products designed to make it easier for mobile phone makers to develop Linux-based smart phones. Called the Qtopia Greensuite, it aims to unify the disjointed mobile Linux development environment by bundling together several applications and tools that are available separately today from a variety of vendors. The products in the suite include RealNetworks' mobile multimedia software, Opera Software's mobile phone browser, MontaVista Software's operating system, and Mimer Information Technology's SQL database management product. The suit also includes WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and HTML browsers, messaging software, video and audio recording capabilities, DRM (digital rights management), 3D graphics, video telephony, VOIP (voice over IP) support, a VPN (Virtual Private Network) client and Java MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile). The applications come pre-integrated with Qtopia Phone edition, Trolltech's application development platform for Linux phones. Phone makers that use the suite will save time developing their products because they won't have to integrate all of the software components themselves, Trolltech said. The first version of the suite is due in the second quarter next year. It uses Qtopia's Greenphone as the hardware platform for developing and testing applications. Qtopia introduced the phone, which can operate on a live mobile GSM/GPRS (Global System for Mobile Communications/General Packet Radio Service) network, in August. Qtopia Greensuite will be demonstrated at the ITU World Telecom 2006 show, which starts Dec. 4 in Hong Kong. No pricing has been announced yet. While interest in mobile Linux is growing around the world, the disjointed development environment has slowed momentum. Several groups have formed in the past couple of years to try to unify the environment. The Linux Phone Standards Forum, whose members include France Telecom, MontaVista, and VirtualLogix, are creating application programming interfaces to allow applications to interoperate across Linux handsets. TheÂ Mobile Linux Initiative, started by the Open Source Development LabsÂ with members including Motorola, Intel, and NEC, is unifying developments around the mobile Linux kernel. Forty mobile phone makers including Motorola and ZTE Corp. use Qtopia. Motorola is one of the biggest mobile handset makers using Linux, which is most popular as a mobile phone operating system in China.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Another mobile Linux platform, this time from Azingo, hit the market on Wednesday, joining an increasingly crowded market of Linux phone software.
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CHICAGO - Motorola Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. on Monday said they agreed to an expanded deal to help mobile telephone service providers use Linux-based computers to run their core network systems.
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By de Jonquieres, Julian  CHINA Google and China Mobile are to cooperate on mobile search facilities as both continue their diversification of services in the mainland.
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Google's Android platform is stirring up the mobile-device industry. Introduced this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the open-source platform based on Linux powered prototypes shown by Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, HTC, Motorola, LG and Samsung.
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Use of Linux as a smart phone platform will grow at more than 75% per year because of initiatives from industry leaders such as Motorola and Intel, a new report claims.
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HTC has launched a trio of smartphones at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, including a device resembling a tiny laptop and a Window Mobile 6-based handset with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
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Nokia has offered to buy Trolltech, the Norwegian developer of a widely used application framework, for 844 million Norwegian kroner ($153 million) in cash. Nokia hopes the Trolltech development team will give its own software efforts a boost.Trolltech develops Qtopia, a framework used to build user interfaces for mobile and embedded devices, and Qt, a cross-platform application development framework.Nokia hopes to use Trolltech&#39;s expertise to improve the interfaces on its S40 mobile phone and S60 smartphone platforms, but Trolltech targets many software platforms with its application frameworks.In 2006, Samsung unveiled a reference design for a mobile phone running Qtopia Phone Edition on top of a Linux operating system. And the Trolltech team has been working since late 2006 on a version of Qt for Microsoft&#39;s Windows CE and Windows Mobile platforms.Qt is also used in a variety of widely used desktop software, including Skype&#39;s Internet telephony application, the Google Earth satellite photo browser, and Adobe Photoshop Album, now part of the Photoshop Elements image editor, according to Trolltech.The framework is available under commercial and open-source licenses: it is also used by the developers of KDE, a desktop environment for Linux operating systems. Trolltech recently updated the licensing conditions for Qt, making the code available under the GPLv3 license in addition to the GPLv2 license it already uses.The Trolltech team will become part of Nokia&#39;s research and development group, where it plans to continue its work with the developers of KDE.Despite the close relationship Nokia will now have with the developers of KDE, the company will continue to use a rival software platform in its Linux-based N800 and N810 mobile Internet devices.&quot;Our platform for Internet tablets will continue to be based on the Gnome environment,&quot; said Kai &#214;ist&#228;m&#246;, Nokia&#39;s executive vice president for devices.However, Nokia will use Qt in its S40 and S60 platforms, &#214;ist&#228;m&#246; said. He would not say when phones containing the code will reach the market.Nokia has pledged to continue offering commercial and open source licenses for Qt and other Trolltech products as it continues their future development.The two companies expect to complete the acquisition in the second quarter. The deal requires the approval of holders of 90 percent of Trolltech&#39;s shares. Nokia already has support from the holders of 66 percent of the shares, it said.
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What is happening with carrier grade Linux and kernel contributions in this area?
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Trolltech, a provider of software development platforms and frameworks, hopes to open up mobile application development to Web developers with support for WebKit.Trolltech plans to announce on Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it has integrated QT, its development platform, with WebKit, the Web browser technology used by Apple, Nokia, Google, Motorola and others. The integration should make it easier for developers to build products that integrate online components into mobile phone applications.Trolltech, a Norwegian company that&#160;Nokia recently announced plans to buy, has integrated the tools so that developers can build the bulk of an application using HTML and the rest using C ++. By using HTML to create most of the application, handset makers can save development costs because C ++ engineers are typically harder to find and more expensive to use, said Benoit Schillings, CTO of Trolltech. However, they can still create some features using C ++, which offers more functionality and performance.A handset maker could decide to use HTML to create features that it might want to tweak to appeal to different audiences. For example, a handset maker may want to enlarge visual items on a page in a phone designed for older people, and they can adapt and customize those features quicker using HTML than C ++, Schillings said.Even though the applications may be primarily built using HTML, they don&#39;t have to be browser-based or require an Internet connection, he said. However, he envisions interesting ways to combine offline and online applications.For example, Trolltech has demonstrated an address book application that phone users can access without going online. The application collects information from a user&#39;s Facebook friends, adding photos or other new content from friends&#39; Facebook pages into their address book entry.The Qt WebKit integration will be available as a module in Qt 4.4, which is expected to come out in the second quarter.Trolltech also planned to release Qtopia Phone Edition version 4.3 in Barcelona, adding support for new features including touch-screens. The new Qtopia Synch Agent syncs data between Qtopia and Microsoft Outlook.&#160;
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Open-source Linux is coming of age for mobile phones. While Google's Android platform has attracted attention at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Spain, so has LiMo, another Linux-based platform.
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InfoWorld - The Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum planned to release its first mobile phone specifications on Monday, in hopes of encouraging more applications for Linux phones.