NEC writes Motorola out of mobile Linux history

A CONSORTIUM of happy partners, including NEC, Motorola, LG and Samsung has just announced a brace of shiny new phones based on the mobile Linux platform. However, it appears that in this partnership, some partners are more equal than others.

When NEC published a comment from the LiMo Foundation, which represents all the companies behind the new Mobile Linux platform, it erased all mention of its erstwhile partners from the LiMo chief's statements.

NEC is now claiming that it's LiMo-based phones are the first in the world. In this, the company is blithely ignoring the fact that similar phones have also been announced by six other firms which probably thought they were standing shoulder-to-shoulder with NEC in the LiMo Foundation.

“The breadth of the initial wave of LiMo handsets—18 models from seven vendors—consolidates LiMo’s role as the unifying force within Mobile Linux and highlights the strong momentum established in the 12 months since LiMo was launched,” said Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation. At least, that's what he wanted to say, according to the Foundation's version of events.

However, NEC's spinners surgically sliced his praise for the other vendors out of the middle of Mr. Gillis' statements when they republished them.

NEC then goes on to imply that its lovely new handsets are absolutely the only Linux Mobile handsets you'll find at the ongoing Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, honest. This denies the existence of Motorola's U9, Samsung's SGH-i800, and a host of others.

Squabbling between stalwart partners aside, the LiMo Platform itself has a goal of building on industry standards and open-source software – although it does include a secure run-time environment for downloaded applications. The OS has a modular design supporting core functions extended with plug-ins. The architecture is intended to be hardware independent, with hardware-specific modules used to make the same basic software work with any hardware. µ