The LiMo Foundation announced 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 are made by LG Electronics Inc., Motorola Inc., NEC Corp., Panasonic Corporation of North America, Samsung Electronics Co. and others. Some of the mobile Linux phones already used by consumers are Motorola’s Razr2 and Motorokr.
The LiMo Platform is being readied by mobile leaders working in unison to deliver an open handset platform for use by the whole industry,” said Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation. “The first release of the LiMo Platform combines technologies already extensively market proven within an array of leading handsets. This will enable initial LiMo handsets to register in the marketplace far more rapidly than handsets based on unproven technology. In addition, we are now making the platform APIs freely available to the public in order to begin the widespread engagement of developer talent and innovation that will shape the new mobile consumer experiences of tomorrow.”
“We are very proud of the transparent, balanced and harmonious
contribution process that led to the on-schedule rollout of R1 of the LiMo
platform and our API specifications. This unique process — with its shared
leadership and decision-making — has delivered the benefits of both
community-based and proprietary development,” said Kiyohito Nagata of NTT
DoCoMo, chairperson of LiMo Foundation. “The evolution of the platform is
an ongoing process. We are delighted with the wide range companies
contributing to that process as we now work on Release 2.”
The LiMo Platform-leveraging standards and open-source projects -- is a
modular, plug-in-based, hardware-independent architecture built around an
open operating system, with a secure run-time environment for support of
downloaded applications. Linux was selected as the core technology for the
LiMo Platform for its acceptability by the whole mobile industry, its rich
functionality and scalability, its record of success in embedded systems
and mobile phones and its potential to easily “cross-platformize” with
other product categories.
"With LiMo announcing the first release of the platform that is common
across many handset vendors and models, the stage is set for mobile
innovation on Linux,” said Guido Arnone, Director of Terminals Technology,
Vodafone, and vice chairperson of LiMo Foundation. “The LiMo Platform
enables operators and handset makers to assign greater investment to
technologies that improve the consumer experience and technology vendors
and ISVs to target their products for a software platform that is being
broadly adopted by the whole industry.”
Third-party developers will use LiMo's API specifications -- available
in beta form immediately at http://www.limofoundation.org — to build new
applications that deliver next-generation consumer experiences across a
tremendous, stable base of globally deployed mobile devices. Middleware
components for the LiMo Platform can be implemented in either C or C++
programming languages.
Launched in January 2007, the LiMo Foundation is open to all vendors
and service providers in the mobile communications marketplace, including
device manufacturers, operators, chipset manufacturers, independent
software vendors, integrators and third-party developers.