LiMo could do with a little of the limelight.
The mobile Linux operating system has been almost forgotten as Google-led Android has become the open-source flavour of the year for handset makers and carriers.
But on Thursday, LiMo recorded some progress in its adoption, with SK Telecom and Samsung announcing South Korea’s first LiMo-compliant phone.
The Samsung SCH-M510 is a smartphone with Wi-Fi, a 3.5-inch WVGA AMOLED screen and a 5 megapixel autofocus camera.
It is the 45th LiMo handset to appear since the LiMo Foundation was formed by the mobile industry in January 2007.
However, SK is only the third carrier to offer LiMo phones – NTT DoCoMo of Japan has been responsible for the vast majority of handsets and Vodafone has recently begun offering two of the Samsung LiMo handsets in the UK.
LiMo is especially suited to carriers – it offers a software stack and middleware but, unlike Android, no specific user interface.
“We are a very strong blank canvas upon which big carriers like DoCoMo and Vodafone can deploy their own vision of what the consumer experience might be,” Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation, told me at the Open Mobile Summit earlier this month.
“In a more free way, they can confederate services onto the device to provide the consumer with a richer experience and a greater measure of choice.”
So LiMo is empowering operators – giving them more control of the services they offer and earn revenues from, rather than having to accept the interfaces of others.
“You can view this as the organised strategic response of major carriers within the industry to the new competitive dynamic that has emerged through Google on the one hand and through Nokia extending its reach,” said Mr Gillis.
Vodafone has produced an attractive interface that is similar to the social networking information offered on contacts by Motorola’s Motoblur interface on Android phones.
But LiMo does not have anything like the Android Market or Apple’s App Store to encourage developers to produce applications for its platform. Carriers may have their own storefronts in future though, and there is promise in the JIL (Joint Innovation Lab) initiative by Vodafone, Verizon Wireless, China Mobile and Softbank to create a common mobile widget infrastructure.
However, LiMo and non-Android Linux mobile operating systems are up against it. Gartner expects their market share in smartphones to fall from 7 per cent this year to 2 per cent in 2012, as Android’s share grows from 1.6 per cent to 18 per cent.
