LiMo Gains Steam as Mobile Linux of Choice
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Several key supporters are abandoning the LiPS standard to embrace its competitor in mobile Linux projects.
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The LiMo Foundation has added some members to its ranks as competition among new mobile Linux platforms heats up.LiMo plans to announce on Monday new members, including Trolltech, Acrodea, ETRI, Huawei, and Purple Labs. The group, including founders NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone, and Motorola, now consists of 25 members.Trolltech said that it quit its participation in the Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS Forum), a group setting mobile Linux standards, in favor of working with LiMo. &quot;This is a solution based on code, not just a specification,&quot; said Benoit Schillings, CTO of Trolltech. Trolltech decided that LiMo&#39;s efforts were more likely to produce a real product before the LiPS initiative, he said.Trolltech&#39;s conversion comes after the LiPS Forum chose to base its user interface framework on Gnome&#39;s GTK toolkit rather than Trolltech&#39;s competitive application platform and user interface for Linux phones.Trolltech&#39;s change of heart is indicative of the heated competition in the fledgling market for Linux mobile phones. In addition to LiPS and LiMo with their different goals,&#160;Google recently announced its Linux-based mobile operating system, Android.While Android and its Open Handset Alliance supporters are creating a competitive offering to LiMo&#39;s software, LiMo&#39;s head says its effort has advantages.&quot;An important difference is that the code within the LiMo platform is market-proven technology that has been brought to the platform by our founder members in the form of Motorola, Samsung, NEC, and Panasonic,&quot; said Morgan Gillis, executive director of LiMo. &quot;We simply reintegrated it to form the first release of the LiMo platform.&quot; That contrasts with Android, a new software platform containing &quot;unproven code&quot; that Google has only just produced, he said. It typically takes two to three years before handset software is stabilized and ready for volume production, he said.LiMo expects to unveil the first release of its open Linux-based operating system as well as APIs for developers during the first quarter. It also expects that the first handsets based on the software will hit the market during the quarter.
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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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In this week's entry we'll look at two more "live" CDs of Linux systems optimized for multimedia creation and performance. I've been having a great time with these systems, and I hope that my mini-profiles inspire you to try them all. They're a great way to introduce someone to Linux, they show off the system optimized for multimedia performance and they provide a wealth of high-quality sound and music software to exploit that system. They all include the standard cornucopia of applications for the mundane tasks, word processing, text editing, graphics, networking, and so on. All that, for the cost of a download and a disc.
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Palm has introduced a new "mobile companion" product for smartphones called the Foleo. It's shaped like a sub-notebook computer with a 10-inch display and full-sized keyboard.
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Hewlett-Packard Co has launched its first iPAQ in the candybar form factor. It is among the first devices running Windows Mobile 6.0, with a WiFi radio and a UMA client.
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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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One of the minor ironies of the Linux world is the slight disconnect between the mantra of &quot;choice&quot; the most ardent advocates use to make the case for a multitude of graphical interfaces and the state of the North American enterprise Linux market, where a
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The device is more like a souped-up smart phone and handheld with laptop features, a camera, speakers for music, GPS and more. It's also available only in Asia, with a European rollout promised soon.
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Samsung and LG Electronics unveiled mobile phones running on LiMo, the new mobile Linux.
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A new entry in the already-crowded mobile removable media space is a welcome addition, because it supports a truly universal standard: USB.
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The recipe for a mobile Linux-based application ecosystem Comment Why should an operating system be important for a mobile phone? It shouldn't, but of course mobile phones are no longer simple voice communicators, they are smart devices capable of many methods of communication and other sophisticated applications. Capable and complex, with a high degree of variety required to meet different market and user needs.â¦
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BenQ has unveiled the user interface for an upcoming Linux-based 'mobile Internet device.'
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(InfoWorld) - MontaVista Software planned to announce on Wednesday the latest version of its Linux-based mobile phone operating system, expected to be available in November. MontaVista's MobilinuxÂ 5.0 includes a number of updates, such as improved security, better power management tools, support for various types of connectivity such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on USB (Universal Serial Bus) dongles, and faster startup times. MontaVista says its operating system runs 90 percent of existing Linux-based smartphones. But competition is heating up for the software developer, since analysts have been predicting dramaticÂ growth for mobile LinuxÂ and a number of new consortiums are working on interoperability issues. ABI Research, for example, recently said that it expects cumulative Linux mobile device shipments between 2006 and 2012 to reach 331 million. Mobilinux 5.0's new features help set it apart from other Linux operating systems out there, said Dan Cauchy, director of product marketing for MontaVista. For example, the new OS includes a miniaturized version of SELinux, the security technology developed by the U.S. National Security Agency. The MontaVista version, MicroSELinux, enables role-based access control so users with different security levels can use a single device running Mobilinux. The new version also includes improvements to the software's dynamic power management capabilities. Mobilinux 5.0 includes APIs (application programming Interfaces) so developers can make use of the power management capabilities. In tests, MontaVista applied the power management techniques to MP3 playback on a phone so the device would almost shut off between MP3 packets, said Cauchy. The process allowed the phone to play MP3 songs five times as long as the same phone without the power management technology, he said. The new OS also improves on device startup times, MontaVista said. Mobilinux 5.0 phones typically boot in less than five seconds. The software is small too, MontaVista said. A basic implementation can be done in less than 14M bytes. Mobilinux 5.0 also includes another upgrade that should please developers, the executives said. MontaVista has added the capability to debug over USB. Normally, developers debug over a serial line, but most mobile devices don't have serial ports anymore, Cauchy said. That means developers often have to use a special test environment in order to debug. "We've been badgered by customers to do this, honestly, because it's such a limit without," said Jim Ready, CTO and founder of MontaVista. "This lets them debug on a real phone as opposed to in a lab." Mobilinux 5.0 includes support for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi over USB as well as SDIO (Secure Digital Input Output), which can save developers time developing such support, MontaVista said. The OS will be available in November and initially will support Texas Instruments' OMAP 2430 chips followed by OMAP 3430. Other chips will follow in 2008, MontaVista said.
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Theater-quality entertainment systems are coming to the car. Is rush hour ready for wireless file swapping?
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In the current issue: &nbsp;October 2006  Slap a "Powered by Linux" sticker on your front door. The October issue of Linux Journal takes "Linux Everywhere" literally. See how Linux runs a total multimedia center like TiVo on steroids, serves as a central phone system with call screening, regulates your home heating system, controls robots and much more.  This isn't just a digital lifestyle, it's a Linux lifestyle of leisure, which proves that geeks, particularly Linux geeks, truly have the best toys.  Not a subscriber? Check out this post to read abstracts of the current issues' articles and to read for "free" this months Bonus Article: Do-It-Yourself Robots with Linux by Michael Surran.
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The LiMo Foundation plans to announce 18 phones based on its platform, including some that are already on the market, on Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.The phones come from LG Electronics, Motorola, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung, and others. Included among the&#160;LiMo phones&#160;already used by consumers are Motorola&#39;s Razr2 and Motorokr as well as a number of NTT DoCoMo handsets.&quot;The LiMo platform in Release One uses technology that the founder companies had created from two to three years ago,&quot; said Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation. That means that some existing phones can now be designated as LiMo handsets, even though Release One isn&#39;t officially available.&#160;LiMo plans to release the first version of its open-source Linux-based operating system platform for mobile phones&#160;in March.Some of the handset makers, including LG, Aplix and Purple Labs, plan to exhibit prototype and reference handsets based on LiMo at the conference. The Purple Labs reference design is a 3G (third-generation) phone designed to cost less than US$100, Gillis said.LiMo also plans to announce on Monday that it will make a software development kit available in the second half of this year. The SDK will provide Eclipse-based tools so that developers can build software for LiMo handsets. Access, Motorola, Wind River and other LiMo members are developing the SDK.&quot;We&#39;re hoping to empower mobile developers on a broad scale to work with us and to bring their applications and services to consumers in a direct way,&quot; said Gillis.Despite the interest in Linux mobile phones and the variety of groups working on it including LiMo, the&#160;LiPS (Linux Phone Standards) Forum&#160;and&#160;Google&#39;s Open Handset Alliance, market momentum has stalled. A recent report from Canalys revealed that total&#160;Linux phone shipments in 2007 were essentially flat&#160;compared to 2006.