Mobile Linux group releases first specification

While Google's Linux mobile phone platform, Android, has been stealing the
spotlight, another longer-standing mobile Linux group is also moving ahead.

The Linux
Phone Standards Forum (LiPS), comprised of companies including Orange, France
Telecom, MontaVista and Access, completed the first release of its mobile Linux
specification, it announced Monday. The group released half of the specification
in June and has now added components including APIs (application programming
interfaces) for telephony, messaging, calendar, instant messaging and presence
functions, as well as new user interface components.

The specification covers all the key components for building a feature phone
or a smart phone but is not meant to be a specification for a complete phone
stack, said Bill Weinberg, general manager for LiPS. The idea is to allow developers
to create applications that will work on all phones that use the LiPS specification.

The telephony API is a particularly important feature of the specification
because it allows developers to create applications around the voice telephony
functionality of the device, he said. That's a capability developers won't have
with some other phone platforms like Apple's iPhone, which isn't expected to
support development around telephony, he said.

LiPS expects to see multiple implementations of the standard in commercial
phones, possibly quite soon, he said. In the next six months, the group should
release some revisions to the specification based on real world experience.
Beyond that, LiPS should begin releasing additional enabling technologies to
the specification, he said.

The market greeted the launch of LiPS in 2005 with some fanfare, but nothing
like the excitement around Google's recent announcement of Android. LiPS is
different from the Open Handset Alliance, the group supporting Google's Android,
because it is a specification that allows users to create different interoperable
implementations while Android is itself one implementation of Linux, Weinberg
said. "The basic notion of what OHA and Android put forth is an implementation
of a phone stack that is Java-based and a given implementation," he said.
"If that implementation is broadly accepted and devices are built on it,
it could constitute a de facto standard. Our approach is a traditional one of
standardization."

The various mobile Linux groups are essentially after the same thing, he said.
"I'd say [LiPS] and OHA and for that matter LiMo are all attempting to
unify what some people say is a fragmented market, but we're going about it
in different fashions," Weinberg said. LiMo is a group founded by Motorola,
NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone, Samsung and others to build a mobile Linux platform.

Weinberg admitted that the groups are competitive in at least one sense: They're
all competing for resources to work on their respective projects. "They
aren't competitive outright, they're just different approaches to the same problem,"
he said.