Mobile Linux Group Releases First Specification

narramissic writes "Google's Android may be getting all the headlines, but the venerable LiPS (Linux Phone Standards Forum), which launched to much fanfare in 2005, is rolling out the specs. The group, comprised of companies including Orange, France Telecom, MontaVista, and Access, announced Monday that it has completed the first release of its mobile Linux specification, adding components including APIs for telephony, messaging, calendar, instant messaging, and presence functions, as well as new user interface components."

Comments

Re:Too little, too late

[morgan_greywolf]

Well, me... I'm personally holding out for a Python API. Python is really good for RAD work, and well, I gotta tell you, I don't have time for traditional development methods these days. Python is easy and quick. And that's how mobile app development should be -- you should be able to write apps on the go!

Android will win

[realdodgeman]

OpenMoko and LiSP are too little, too late. Android is in the works, and they got it all: Branding, a prototype GUI, and the right members (Open Handset Alliance Project).

Android will be the Linux on mobile phones, and it will be great.

Re:Android will win

[zullnero]

As a mobile developer, your comment is hilarious. I'd mod it +5 funny, but few non-mobile software developers would get the joke. "Will be great"?

EVERYONE says that about their new upcoming mobile OS. Then it gets released, and we discover something seriously flawed about it. No APIs for custom hardware. Difficult path for porting pre-existing applications from other platforms over to it. Poor performance. Security flaws. Vendor lock-in. Insufficient API. Nonstandard. If you've ever seriously written an enterprise mobile app, you'd have a clue about this already. You frequently have to work with very custom hardware and software solutions, requiring a very major amount of flexibility and language/API maturity. So, if Google does it, that means everyone will just drop everything they're doing and furiously work to be compatible with it? Ha. Everyone will rewrite their application that their customers have been using for years because Google made a mobile OS? Nope...every company I've worked for in the past couple years decided when getting me to work on their project that Windows Mobile "might be worth investing the time into". It takes a heck of a long time to catch on, and an even longer time to get companies to devote resources into developing for it. If you aren't following an open standard with plenty of information readily available, it takes even longer.

That's most likely the road that Android is going to take. Just because Google is behind it doesn't mean that it will be used by anyone. Lots of Google's side projects end up by the wayside. And just because it comes from Google doesn't mean it'll be "great", either. Maybe Android will end up on Blackberries in a couple years or so.

Access Screwed Up Linux on Palm Phone

[Doc Ruby]

Talk about LiPService: Access (of Japan) was the company that basically bought the PalmOS away from Palm. They claimed (in 2005) that they were going to roll out mobile phones running Linux, with PalmOS GUI and binary compatibility. Where are they? Just now putting out just specs, right as Google and the rest of the world blot them out of existence. Nearly certainly taking chances of a Linux mobile with Palm compatibility (and its library of apps and developers) to zero.