LiMo Foundation completes LiMo Platform Rel 1

LONDON, ENGLAND & TOKYO, JAPAN: LiMo Foundation, a global consortium of mobile leaders delivering an open handset platform for the whole mobile industry, announced today the on-schedule availability of LiMo Platform Release 1. The LiMo Platform is the world’s first globally competitive, Linux-based software platform for mobile devices.

“With Release 1 of the LiMo Platform now completed, LiMo Foundation has established a scalable and sustainable mobile device platform that will spur rapid innovation and contributions from all LiMo members,” said Morgan Gillis, executive director of LiMo Foundation. “This is an extremely exciting time to be a part of the LiMo Foundation – 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.”

The LiMo Platform—leveraging standards and open-source projects—is a modular, plug-in, hardware-independent architecture built around an open operating system, with a secure run-time environment for support of downloaded applications.  All of the enabling technology within Release 1—created by the foundation’s Founder members—has now been commercially deployed and proven within multiple handsets enjoyed by consumers today, as well as in several reference and pilot devices that will be on the market later this year. This represents hundreds of millions of dollars of technology investment to date.

Release 2 of the LiMo Platform is now being specified and developed within a collaborative process involving a range of LiMo members and is planned to be completed in a late 2008 timeframe.

Kiyohito Nagata of NTT DoCoMo, chairman of LiMo Foundation added, “With developers able to cost-effectively leverage LiMo's global reach and market-tested expertise in rolling out their innovations, the mobile Internet experiences of consumers everywhere stand to be transformed.”

Third-party developers can use LiMo’s application programming interface (API) specifications—available now at www.limofoundation.org—to build new applications that deliver next-generation consumer experiences across a tremendous, stable base of globally deployed mobile devices. Middleware components for the LiMo Platform can be implemented in either C or C++ programming languages.  Software Development Kits for Native, Webkit and Java operating environments will be released from the second half of 2008, further empowering mobile application developers.