LiMo Foundation membership grows by five

Five more companies have joined the LiMo Foundation, the organization developing an open software platform based on the mobile Linux operating system. The new members are Acrodea, ETRI, Huawei, Purple Labs and Trolltech.

The organization was launched last January by Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics and Vodafone with the goal of using best practices originating in the open developer community, such as transparency and scalability, for the creation of a globally competitive Linux-based software platform for mobile devices. Accordingly, it has opened its doors to all vendors and service providers in the mobile communications market in the hopes that doing so will ultimately lower the development costs, increase flexibility and support a richer mobile ecosystem.

Recently, the organization announced that member Azingo, a developer of open mobile software platforms, has been selected to provide core components of the platform’s Common Integration Environment (CIE). The CIE will be used by handset manufacturers to develop and test future releases of the platform. Included in the CIE are Azingo’s software phone emulator, testing and bug tracking tools, software management tools and Azingo’s reference mobile phone applications that use the LiMo platform’s application programming interfaces (APIs).

The LiMo Foundation anticipates the first release of the software to be delivered sometime this quarter, with LiMo-based handsets coming out later in the year.

For more information, visit www.limofoundation.org.