PalmSource spearheads LiPS Forum for Linux cellphone standards

Today we see the dawning of a new special interest group, friends: the Linux Phone Standardization (LiPS) Forum is bent on, um, standardizing Linux for the mobile phone (easier said than done, we can assure you). The Forum, in the works for a little while now, was founded in order to ease vendor development for the platform, as well as to provide consumers a standards-based alternative to Symbian and Windows Mobile, which is exactly what's necessary if Linux on the mobile is going to go up against the big boys. Initial members include PalmSource (fresh out of their aquisition by Access), Orange, MontaVista, FSM Labs, and ARM Holdings (among others, we presume). When we'll actually see products based on the LiPS standards is pretty much up for grabs, but you know what they say about duty now for the future.

[Stu L Tissimus @ Dec 19th 2005 12:55AM]

Something to note about this announcement: Seeing as PalmSource is the main backer of this group, it's almost positive that they are still working on Palm for Linux. Also, it's surprising to see that Nokia isn't on this bandwagon - They've been really active in the Linux community as of late.

[Simon Waddington @ Dec 19th 2005 12:55AM]

That's the first I've heard of Nokia being active in the Linux community (I'm not disputing you its just news to me - I'd love to see a Linux based Nokia phone!). Maybe Symbian will produce a Symbian API on Linux too? Then Symbian and Palm apps can all play happy families together on the same Linux host OS? Come to think of it, with increasing use of virtualization technologies its only a matter of time before someone thinks to put it into a phone so you can actually run Palm OS, Symbian OS and Linux on the same chip (communicating via the network stack).