A French company that designs mobile phones based on Linux and the LiMo Platform has announced the opening of a sales office in Seoul, Korea. The new Purple Labs office will be run by Grant Jang, reporting to Gordon Tsang (pictured), the company's SVP for Asia.

In January, Purple Labs opened an office in Beijing, China, headed up by Tsang. Korean office chief Jang previously led the Korean office for Openwave Systems, a mobile phone software company that was also the previous home for Tsang, as well as new Purple Labs VP of Sales, Arnaud Dammert.

Purple Magic (Click for details)

Purple Labs is said to offer “one-stop” services “from hardware reference design to a complete customizable Linux software suite.” Its published, open source Linux suite targets mass-market feature phones, and was used in the Grundig U900. More recently, Purple Labs announced a LiMo-compatible, sub-$100 3G phone hardware/software reference design called the Purple Magic (pictured at right). Based on a hardware reference design from NXP Semiconductors, it uses VirtualLogix's VLX-MH virtualization stack.

Two of LiMo's members — Samsung and LG — are based in Korea, and both supply phones to Verizon Wireless, which recently joined LiMo, promising LiMo phones starting in 2009.

Stated Tsang, "With both Samsung and LGE participating in the LiMo Foundation, there are now clear market opportunities in Korea for our mobile Linux solutions. Our investment in a Korean team directly reflects our commitment to serving these important customers."

 
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