LinuxWorld

LinuxWorld Opens

Posted by samc on August 7th, 2007

LinuxWorld opens today, August 6-9, 2007 in San Francisco. Linux and open source users will gather at San Francisco’s Moscone Center to examine the latest products and solutions, hear about emerging trends in the industry, and experience new content focusing on key themes including virtualization, mobile and embedded Linux, Linux on the desktop and more. Here some First Looks and Exhibitor news.

Today at LinuxWorld, Motorola announced MOTOMAGX, its next generation mobile Linux platform. MOTOMAGX is said to lay the foundation to deliver new levels of openness, flexibility and support for third-party applications on Motorola mobile devices.

Motorola has sold more than 9 million Linux-based handsets worldwide. In the next few years, up to 60% of Motorola’s handset portfolio is expected to be based on Linux, with the MOTOMAGX platform playing a key role in supporting this strategy, says the company.

The first products based on the MOTOMAGX platform include the music-optimized MOTOROKR Z6 and the Motorola RAZR2 V8 handsets, available now in select markets worldwide. The RAZR2 V8 will be Motorola’s first Linux-based device bound for North America.

Motorola’s MOTOMAGX platform is designed to support a broad array of content created by third-party developers. Today, MOTOMAGX supports applications developed in Java ME, with plans to introduce new WebUI (featuring web technology to enable widgets and Web 2.0 experiences) and native Linux application environments in upcoming releases.

According to the company, these three application environments, combined with Motorola’s MOTODEV Studio integrated development environment, will help enable developers to innovate and accelerate time to market for their applications.

“MOTOMAGX, when paired with the tools and support from our MOTODEV Developer network, provides a powerful platform for innovation — making it easier and faster for developers to create new applications for our mobile devices,” said Christy Wyatt, vice president, ecosystem and market development, Motorola. “This opens exciting possibilities for what tomorrow’s mobile applications will be able to do and the new device experiences they will support.”

Developers interested in creating applications for the MOTOMAGX platform using Java ME can do so today by downloading the MOTODEV Studio for Java ME application development environment at motorola.com/developer. WebUI and native Linux plug-ins for MOTODEV Studio are expected to be available to select developers by the end of Q4 2007.

In other news,
In other news, The LiMo Foundation, which aims to collectively develop a Linux-based platform for mobile phones, announced yesterday that handsets running the LiMo platform will reach the market by 2008. The organization, which also announced the addition of new members, works collaboratively with the open-source software community and other companies in the mobile industry.

Originally founded by Motorola, NEC, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, Vodafone, and NTT DoCoMo in 2007, LiMo was created to combat fragmentation in the Linux mobile ecosystem and fill the need for a standardized mobile platform that can be developed transparently and used without the need to pay licensing fees. The LiMo stack makes extensive use of open-source software technologies, but some of the top-level APIs are proprietary.

An important part of that ecosystem is the GNOME Mobile and Embedded (GMAE) platform, an assortment of high-level software building blocks for mobile Linux application development. The GNOME Mobile and Embedded platform, is a key component of the LiMo Application UI Framework and is used extensively on other Linux-based devices, including Nokia’s N800 web tablet, the One Laptop Per Child project’s XO laptop, FIC’s Neo1973 mobile phone, the Access Linux Platform, and Intel’s MID system.

Don Park of DailyWireless explains why he’s excited about the Neo Phone:

Everyone knows what the iPhone can do. Here are a couple things the Neo1973 does better. It has a GPS receiver. It has a CSR bluecore 4 chip with full linux support - the iPhone bluetooth support is restricted to the headset profile.

It has a smaller screen size but twice the pixels (640×480@2.8?) of the iPhone (320×480@3.5?). Its got a removable MicroSD slot, although for some reason they put it under the battery. Its missing a wifi radio, but the next phase adds that and more.