The LiMo Foundation met its deadline by unveiling the first release of its Linux-based mobile device platform, LiMo Platform Release 1. The industry consortium also announced that Texas Instruments (TI) was joining the group as a Core member.

The LiMo (Linux Mobile) Platform combines standards and open-source projects into a modular, hardware-independent plug-in architecture that provides a secure run-time environment, says the Foundation. Founded in January 2007, the industry group was confronted with what many see as a competitive mobile platform when Google and the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) announced the Linux-based Android phone stack platform. Both efforts are attempting to consolidate the fragmented mobile Linux market around common platforms in order to reduce costs and promote interoperability.

LiMo Platform Release 1 architecture

TI is joining LiMo as a Core member, below the Founder level (Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Panasonic, Samsung and Vodafone) and alongside fellow Core members Access, Aplix, Azingo, LG Electronics, McAfee, and Wind River. Long the top silicon supplier to the mobile phone market, TI is the first silicon vendor to join at the Core level. Below that there are 19 Associate members including AMD, MontaVista, and Trolltech.

Stated Morgan Gillis, executive director of LiMo, “In slightly more than one year, we have rolled out our deliverables on schedule, our membership has continued to grow strongly with broad engagement from across the mobile communications industry, and leading handset providers have already released a range of devices using LiMo technology.”

Stated Avner Goren, TI's representative on the LiMo board and director of strategic marketing for TI's Wireless Terminals unit, “Joining the LiMo Foundation is a natural complement to TI's commitment to provide solutions for all high-level operating systems, and in particular our long history in Linux development.”

In February of this year LiMo announced that 18 LiMo-based handsets were shipping or were on their way, from vendors that include Aplix, LG Electronics, Motorola, NEC, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Purple Labs, and Samsung. At that time, LiMO also announced nine new members, including Access, Orange, and AMD.

LiMo members are already hard at work on a series of software development kits (SDKs) that should appear in the Fall, along with Release 2, says LiMo. The SDK suite is being developed by a variety of LiMo board members. Access will work on the Native SDK, Aplix will focus on the Java SDK, and Motorola, which recently announced it was going to split off its handset business as a separate company, is developing an SDK for the Webkit HTML rendering engine.

Meanwhile, Wind River provides foundational components for LiMo's common integration environment (CIE), and higher-level tools are to be furnished by Azingo, which claims to offer the first LiMo-compliant mobile phone software stack.

Earlier this month, TI also announced it was joining the more enterprise-focused Linux Foundation.

Availability

LiMo's Release 1 application programming interface (API) specifications, which can be implemented as middleware in either C or C++, are available for download now at LiMo's API download page.

 
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