“Today’s announcement that SK Telecom will be bringing its first LiMo compliant handset to market is a significant milestone in the ongoing global growth and adoption of LiMo technologies,” said Morgan Gillis, Executive Director of LiMo Foundation. “LiMo’s global operators are committed to providing highly compelling and customized LiMo devices to their mobile subscribers – this initial handset from Samsung and SKT demonstrates the rapid maturation and opportunity within the LiMo ecosystem.”

The Samsung SCH-M510 is a rich media device with support for various audio and video media types and features a 3.5” WVGA AMOLED screen and a 5 megapixel autofocus camera. This handset also features Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity and also includes support for proximity, accelerometer and ambient light sensors.

LiMo Foundation was launched in January 2007 by mobile industry leaders to provide the mobile industry with an open, consistent Mobile Linux-based handset OS, enabling the development of immersive, next-generation mobile consumer experiences. LiMo’s membership includes mobile industry leaders from around the world, including OEMs, technology developers, and 13 global network operators that collectively represent nearly a billion mobile subscribers.

Samsung H1 / Samsung M1

The Vodafone 360 service is automatically backed up and synchronised, regularly and wirelessly, between the mobile and PC or Mac. All contacts updates, emails, photos and conversation history or settings changes made either at home or when on the move are saved, keeping all the content up-to-date.

“Vodafone 360 is the first service of its kind to offer customers the benefits of a truly integrated mobile internet experience that gathers all their contacts and content, all around them, in one place,” said Pieter Knook, Director of Internet Services at Vodafone Group.

At launch four Nokia Symbian smartphones will come pre-loaded with Vodafone 360 and part or all of the service will be downloadable to over one hundred popular phones. In the coming months Vodafone will be making the service available through as wide a selection of handsets and operating systems from multiple manufacturers as possible.

The 2009 launch in Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the UK will be followed by launches in a number of other countries in 2010, including India, Turkey, South Africa, New Zealand and Romania and in France through SFR. through MTS in Russia, and through Vodafone Hutchison Australia.

[via slashgear]

[via idnes.cz]

I’m pleased to announce that the Linux 2.6 kernel has been ported to Apple’s iPhone platform, with support for the first and second generation iPhones as well as the first generation iPod touch. This is a rough first draft of the port, and many drivers are still missing, but it’s enough that a real alternative operating system is running on the iPhone.

What we have:

• Framebuffer driver
• Serial driver
• Serial over USB driver
• Interrupts, MMU, clock, etc.

What we have in openiboot (but hasn’t been ported yet):

• Read-only support for the NAND

What we don’t have (yet!):

• Write support for the NAND
• Wireless networking
• Touchscreen
• Sound
• Accelerometer
• Baseband support

You can see a short narrated video demonstrating iPhone Linux below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

[image credit]

Some of the new LiMo members previously participated in the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum, which announced in June 2008 that it would fold activities into LiMo in order to accelerate the emergence of common mobile Linux specifications and implementations and to bolster the emerging mobile Linux developer community creating new mobile applications, services and end-user experiences.

“These 11 new members will join the development of a consistent and competitive global handset OS (operating system), within which the collaborative benefits of shared cost and innovation are realized and upon which diverse, commercially driven differentiation freely thrives.” said Morgan Gillis, executive director of LiMo Foundation.

Six mobile industry leaders launched LiMo Foundation in January 2007 in order to deliver an open and globally consistent, Mobile Linux-based software platform for use by the entire mobile industry. So far, 21 mobile handset models have been brought to market utilizing LiMo Platform technology.

“This latest group of new members demonstrates the rapidly expanding reach of the LiMo ecosystem, and we are very excited by their commitment to further enrich the LiMo Platform and accelerate its adoption within all markets,” said Morgan Gillis, executive director of LiMo Foundation. “It is now clear that LiMo’s transparent and participative governance model and total focus on the handset operating system-which are designed to avoid value-chain distortion-are proving to be very attractive to the whole industry.”

Launched in January 2007 by six mobile industry leaders-Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics and Vodafone-LiMo was formed to deliver an open and globally consistent software platform based upon Mobile Linux for use by the whole industry to catalyze next-generation mobile consumer experiences. LiMo Foundation is open to all vendors and service providers in the mobile communications marketplace, including device manufacturers, operators, chipset manufacturers, integrators and independent software vendors. LiMo members are participating collectively to building a rich ecosystem and have the ability to influence the evolution of the LiMo Platform, leaving them free to provide compelling and differentiated services to customers.

The linux smartphone has quite a clean design at the front. You can see the Send/Answer key at the left, Power/End key at the right and a 5-way nagivation joystick at the center. All user input can be done through its stylus, which is stored at the back of the A810. You can either use the virtual keyboard on the screen to input the text, or activate the handwriting recognition to write on the screen directly. At the back of the phone there is a 2 megapixel camera.

GSM 850 MHz is not listed though, it should be first available in China or Taiwan this year. Detail of the phone can be read from its manual provided by FCC (see link below).

Source [FCC] via [engadgetmobile]

ABI Research vice president Stuart Carlaw notes that, “Clever choice of public license support, along with software engineering that isolates proprietary items from open source items, allows operating system vendors to generate revenue from a very cost-effective OS solution.” He goes on to add that, “Linux OS solutions will be far more cost-effective than incumbent solutions, even when silicon requirements are taken into account, given that a fuller application layer will be included in the standard package and that the burden of customization falls mostly on the independent software vendor.”

A new ABI Research study has found that Linux solutions will be at the center of the drive to bring more content-rich environments to users who currently utilize mid-tier devices. More importantly, it looks increasingly likely that mobile Linux solutions will be an important building block in enabling an application domain that embraces Web-based applications and blended Web/native applications.

abiresearch

Third-party developers can use LiMo’s application programming interface (API) specifications-available now at www.limofoundation.org-to build new applications. 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.