According to jkOnTheRun, Motorola VP, Christy Wyatt, has abandoned her seat on the LiMo Foundation Board. In order to make sure its new position is clear, Motorola took things one step further by changing its association with LiMo from that of a founding member to lowly associate member.

The company also put out the following unambiguous statement:

“At this time [Motorola] feels that the Android platform gives it a richer, more consistent foundation with strong support for the ecosystem and developer community.”

Let’s just hope the Cliq and Tao prove that Motorola is putting its money where its mouth is…into well-made, desirable, Android-powered devices.

The promise of more Android phones isn’t that far from reality as the companies first model (uphone?!?) seem production ready with a Q3 target launch. You have to imagine that Hauwei has more phones in the pipeline ready to be branded and sold under a providers name. Hopefully more details will seep out of Barcelona’s MWC09.

Previously, the GM-built coach was simply a modified DTS or Deville, but you can’t buy a Cadillac car with the styling of The Beast this time around. The front fascia seems to be a cross between an Esculade and the DTS. The overall package works well though. Kind of like a crossover limo with the extra height and bulk that likely hids inches of armor and the plush interior.

The official debut isn’t until January 20 and we likely will not learn anything else about the highly secretive ride. Who wants to bet that it’s got an iPod dock though?

ABI calls the MID market the “first real example of a greenfield situation” in that its believes all mobile OSs will start on “equal footing.” And the report expects mobile Linux to reign supreme due to its “flexibility, customization and very positive cost comparison to Windows Mobile.”

For more on the report check MobileCrunch

ABI calls the MID market the “first real example of a greenfield situation” in that its believes all mobile OSs will start on “equal footing.” And the report expects mobile Linux to reign supreme due to its “flexibility, customization and very positive cost comparison to Windows Mobile.”

As LiMo is the only group that has included smartphones in its mobile Linux project, ABI says it is well positioned in that its platform can “span multiple device segments.”

Another study by research firm Forward Concepts
also predicts that Linux will rule the MIDs market, predicting that MID shipments will grow from 305,000 units in 2008 to 39.6 million units in 2012.

For the latest features and models check out the story at MobileCrunch.

Morgan Gillis, executive director of LiMo Foundation, said in a statement:

“The combination of LiMo’s transparent governance model, balanced development model and extensive mobile industry heritage sets it apart and has garnered strong industry support and engagement. This next wave of LiMo handsets points to the innovation that will flow as the industry coalesces on the LiMo Platform.”

There are now 21 LiMo based mobile phones available, including the seven launched today: the MOTOZINE ZN5 from Motorola; FOMA N906i, FOMA N906iμ, FOMA N906iL and FOMA N706i from NEC; and FOMA P906i and FOMA P706iμ from Panasonic Mobile Communications.

New features include better cameras and international 3G/High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) roaming capabilities, Global Positioning System (GPS), mobile TV and video streaming, secure payment, advanced mail functionalities, higher-resolution displays and more intuitive user interfaces.

The Symbian operating system is currently the most widely used in the world, found on over 50% of “smart mobile device” handsets. This move to open source will place Symbian in competition with Google’s Android platform and the LiMo platform, although only “selected components” will be available at the Symbian Foundation’s launch. The rest of the platform will by fully opened up over the next two years.

With LiMo’s recent announcement that Verizon had hopped onto their Board of Directors, things are starting to heat up between the LiMo platform and Google’s competing product, Android. Both are open-source Linux-based platforms, and both are aiming to rock the handset market sometime in the next year or so.

LiMo is Linux-based. Android is Linux-based. But they’re far from the same. Below, I’ll try to explain some of the key differences without going too heavy on the tech jargon. (Fiiine. It gets a bit heavy for a paragraph or two. But I’ll avoid it where possible.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Verizon has signed up as the final member on the board of directors of the LiMo Foundation, a group founded by Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic, Samsung, and Vodafone “to deliver an open and globally consistent software platform based upon Mobile Linux for use by the whole industry to catalyze next-generation mobile consumer experiences.”

I’m all for openness, but what happens when we suddenly find ourselves with a dozen different “open” mobile alliances like this? Hopefully they’ll all be compatible with one another, although LiMo is commonly known as an Android competitor and questions have arisen as to whether or not the two platforms will play nicely together.

Full press release after the jump.

Verizon Joins LiMo Foundation™

With Verizon on Board of Directors, LiMo Expands Major Wireless Service Provider Engagement Across North America, Asia and Europe

LONDON, England; TOKYO, Japan, and BASKING RIDGE, N.J., United States, May 14, 2008—LiMo Foundation, a global consortium of mobile leaders delivering an open handset platform for the whole mobile industry, and Verizon Wireless, the builder and operator of the most reliable wireless network in the U.S., announced today that Verizon has joined LiMo as a Core member and will fill the final seat on LiMo’s board of directors. By participating in Limo, Verizon hopes to help LiMo unify the mobile industry around openness and Linux as the key enablers to lowering development costs.

“Verizon Wireless is demonstrating itself a champion of openness in mobile innovation by joining the board of LiMo Foundation,” said Morgan Gillis, executive director of LiMo Foundation. “Major wireless service providers from across North America, Asia and Europe are now engaged in committed collaboration through LiMo. This offers further concrete evidence that LiMo is positioned at the heart of the rapidly emerging, industry-wide trend to secure the benefits of openness and choice in technology.”

“Verizon Wireless is committed and invested in encouraging innovation, providing developers the opportunity to deliver new wireless choices and expanding the mobile market,” said Kyle Malady, vice president of network for Verizon. “We expect our involvement with LiMo to advance these principles.”

LiMo Foundation is open to all vendors and service providers in the mobile communications marketplace, including device manufacturers, operators, chipset manufacturers, integrators and independent software vendors. Verizon Wireless joins the foundation’s other 39 members in working within LiMo’s transparent governance model to shape the evolution of the LiMo Platform™, while remaining entirely free to deliver their own compelling and differentiated services to mobile customers.

“The addition of Verizon Wireless to the LiMo roster is another critical milestone in our foundation’s rapid growth and market impact,” said Kiyohito Nagata of NTT DoCoMo, chairperson of LiMo Foundation. “In technical output, governance constructs and business models, LiMo lives out its belief that openness is the key to unlocking innovation to the benefit of the whole industry and mobile consumers everywhere.”

Launched in January 2007 by six mobile industry leaders—Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics and Vodafone—LiMo was formed to deliver an open and globally consistent software platform based upon Mobile Linux for use by the whole industry to catalyze next-generation mobile consumer experiences.

Stripped-down versions of Linux are well suited for modern cellphones. The OS already has all most of the needed code for connectivity of every kind built into it, and there are enough other open-source apps that can be adopted that it cuts production time — and costs — considerably.

Because of this many smartphone makers and application makers and carriers are turning their attention to Linux for handsets. And you might want to consider it too.

Linux now

Among them is Motorola, who currently uses Windows Mobile on its smartphones. Recently, though, Moto announced that it would start basing almost all of its phones on Linux, even the humble RAZR series. Are you using a RAZR 2? That’s Linux, baby. This is a testament to the things Linux can do on even modest hardware.

Samsung has had a handful of its phones running different versions of Linux and plans to roll out more this year. So far it’s released phones (mostly overseas) running Mandrake, RedHat, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, and other flavors. It appears as if Sammy is trying them all on until it finds a good fit.

The future of Linux on handsets

But the real good news is the LiMo Foundation. Counting both Samsung and Motorola as founding members, the LiMo Foundation is a non-profit alliance that aims to create a common Linux-based platform for mobile phones, to insure greater interoperability of apps and communications between member devices.

In other words, it’s something of an official governing body for Linux on phones.

It’s important to note that not all phones will have a full-on install of Linux. In fact, most won’t. Linux’s modular construction means that aside from the kernal itself makers only need install components needed, keeping system overhead low and ensuring ease of use.

Other players

There are others working on putting Linux in your pocket, such as the Openmoko project that combines the open-source software of Linux with the open-source hardware philosophy to make custom, powerful phones.

But the real 800lb gorilla in the mobile Linux world is a name you’ve heard. Google’s Android platform promises to change the game in ways we can’t even anticipate right now.

Android was announced to great fanfare a few months ago and people are looking forward to it as the first real alternative to Windows Mobile in years. By combining Google’s own crack coders with the open-source community, Android is looking like its going to be a powerful force. And by leveraging Google’s own large network of services, the OS becomes almost secondary to the services it handles.

And that’s exactly what an operating system should be like, especially on a phone.

Amping it up

It’d be easy to say that Linux is a trend, but it’s not. Linux is slowly spreading, and when it eventually blankets the mobile world, it won’t be going anywhere. In Japan, there are already over 20 million handsets running Linux being used every day. You can likely expect numbers like that in America within the next year.

This is because people like Linux. Not that it’s popular as an application to the end user, but because there are many programmers already writing apps for the platform. These apps, most of them open-source, can be adapted to the mobile environment fairly easily, again cutting costs and resources spent.

This means a Samsung running the LiMo Platform will look entirely different than a Motorola running the same version. The underlying OS will be compatible.

This type of seamless interoperability is the future of mobile communications, and it’s a welcome one.

Using your Linux-based phone

When you get your first Linux-based phone, you probably won’t know it. Linux has a long way to go to become an appealing mass-market brand. Today it’s still associated with being something only serious nerds can get into, and in some ways it is. Because of this, you likely won’t see “Powered by Linux! Yah!” stickers on mobile phone boxes. But it’ll be in there, silently toiling away as you send catty text messages to your frienemies.

Some phones, though, will proudly boast their Linux cores, especially those meant for enterprise or small business. When these guys hear Linux, they think of security and all things non-Windows.

The large catalog of apps already available will grow as more mobile users adopt the platforms. Now there are few MMS management applications for Linux as there are few uses for it. It’s in the nature of Linux to improve with each implementation, and these improvements will be tangible on handsets, and ultimately might be Linux’s greatest strength in the market.

You will have a Linux phone in the near future, and you will love it, and that won’t make you a nerd.

Taiwan’s High Tech Computer Corp. and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile both plan to offer phones based on Google’s Android software platform. Google is touting Android as a software system that may shakeup mobile telecommunications. Android is designed to make the Web as accessible from mobile devices as it is from PCs.

Android is supported by the Open Handset Alliance which is in direct competition with the LiMo Foundation. As MobileCrunch reported earlier this week, the LiMo Foundation (plans) to Launch (its) Phone Platform in March. By showing its wares at Barcelona, the Open Handset Alliance may be trying to show that its system is ready for a handset while LiMo has yet to launch its platform. If this kind of race interests you, it looks as though the match has gone from the theoretical to the practical.

Research firm Strategy Analytics predicts that Android will be in 2% of smartphones by the end of this year.

LiMo Foundation executive director Morgan Gillis isn’t happy with just publishing the code on time. He wants to put handsets into consumers’ hands and says that will happen very soon.

The LiMo Foundation will publish a beta version of the software’s APIs (application programming interfaces) today so that developers can begin writing applications to run on it. The API’s will remain beta versions because there may be minor changes made to the software before it is launched in March.

The LiMo Foundation is focusing on phones’ middleware so mobile phone manufacturers and operators can write their own user interface and content applications. Gillis says this freedom is important to manufactures and operators because “the cost of developing the first phone on a platform can be as high as half a billion dollars.”

Phone manufactures may be unwilling to invest that much money in a new operating system if it will also leave them tied to another company’s interface and content applications, Gillis said.

“That’s why Windows Mobile and Series 60 didn’t gain broad traction; suppliers didn’t feel comfortable,” he said.

Even though the LiMo Foundation’s code has a few things to be worked out, it has already been proven in handsets sold or distributed by founder members Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic, Samsung Electronics and Vodafone, Gillis said.

LiMo is in competition with Google’s Android code, which is supported by the Open Handset Alliance. This year could see the opening shots of a battle for market share between the LiMo foundation and the Open Source Handset Alliance.

Giants Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodapone are founding members of the LiMo Foundation. The goal of LiMo is to make the Linux-based software platform for mobile devices globally competitive.

“We welcome Celunite as the first mobile phone platform provider to join our founding members engaged in building a world-class mobile Linux platform,” said NTT DoCoMo’s Senior Vice President, Dr. Kiyohito Nagata, chairman of the LiMo Foundation. “Celunite is keen to begin assisting LiMo to realize a competitive step change in the delivery of handsets and service proposition to consumers.”

Celunite