Vendors Team Up To Push Mobile Linux
Open Source Development Labs has brought together a number of companies working on mobile Linux projects in an attempt to coordinate and standardize their efforts in hopes of giving the technology a boost. While Linux on mobile phones has been popular in Asia, it's done nothing in Europe and the US, although it's continually hyped as representing the end of proprietary smartphone OSes: "The problem has always been there's more promise than delivery," says one analyst. The idea behind the initiative is to come up with a standard platform that could be used across multiple vendors, and which the vendors could then build their own applications on top of. If mobile Linux is to emerge as a real player in mobile operating systems, it's got to move more quickly. Bringing together disparate platform development efforts seems like a step in the right direction. After all, it seems like many of the benefits promised by using an open-source OS like Linux disappear when each vendor implements it differently in their handsets -- much like what happened with J2ME.
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