Tizen bubbles out the bottle

Tizen, the open source operating system that came out of LiMO and MeeGo, has been released. It's available for Intel Atom N2800 and N2600 CPUs and ARM CPUs. Who will adopt Tizen is still up for debate, though Intel are still supporting it as they supported the previous incarnations of MeeGo and prior to that Moblin (which was combined with Nokia's Maemo to form MeeGo). Samsung are also expected to support it too. Nokia which was a major supporter of Maemo/MeeGo has put its efforts into Windows Phone and seems to have dropped support for the Linux'ish based operating systems. The industry as a whole also has generally adopted Android form Google (which was also based on a Linux core). However there still could be a market for Tizen in various connected devices such as automotive (where MeeGo was making inroads). The v1.0 release of the code, known as Larkspur, is available for download from the Tizen Technical Steering Group (TTSG) along with development tools.

Symbian to go open source

Nokia is purchasing Symbian (well the bits it doesn't own) for $410. It already owns 48% but other stakeholders include Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Siemens and Panasonic.

Nokia will set-up the Symbian Foundation which will control the code. Nokia will donate their S60 interface, SonyEricsson UIQ and nttDoCoMo LOAM.

With the threat of other open source Linux variants (Android and LiMo), this is probably a sensible move. How they make money out of this move is another matter, though they may still have a licensing arrangement for support and development services.

Microsoft is the only other major OS vendor with the Windows Mobile OS - will they follow suit?

Android gets ready to take on iPhone

Google showed off it's new Android mobile operating system at their developers do in San Fran.

They showed it running on two phones, one a basic version and one with a touch screen that supported 3G.

It seems to operate in a similar fashion to the iPhone with its "home' button and applications accessible via icons. It can utilise systems like accelerometers to measure the devices position, GPS, etc.

Google demo'ed Google Maps which panes in sections as the users moves from location to location.

Though Android is similar to MacOS X on the iPhone, it's different as Apple does not release any of the iPhone's core OS and applications can only be officially distributed through iTunes. Android in theory is completely open and based on Linux (the OS is officially distributed through the Open Handset Alliance) and the development environment is available to anyone (though winners of the Google applications prize are gaining early access to pre-release betas of the new dev systems).

Android could be a real threat to traditional mobile operating systems (WindowsMobile, Symbian, etc) as there are no license fees to pay. Google will leverage Android to move into the hosted app market (which they want to own) as the mobile apps generally are front-ends on to hosted systems.

There are other threats such as LIMO and OpenMoko but currently these are niche players.

LiMo or Mobile Linux

Motorola, NEC, Panasonic Mobile Communications and Samsung, and carriers NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone have got together to form the LiMo Foundatation to encourage Linux as operating system (with applications) for mobile devices.

Membership starts at $40,000 and goes up to $800,000 for big companies and allows access to code and contributions to it.

There's already several Linux variants out there and hopefully this will standardise things, though they might be fighting a losing battle now Symbian have added some POSIX capabilities to their OS.

It might do some hard to Microsoft who are winning inroads in to the mobile market with Windows Mobile.