OStatic

Before there was Android or MeeGo, there was the LiMo Foundation. Founded in January 2007, the foundation was established to provide a Linux-based platform for mobile devices. Despite being around longer, LiMo hasn't gotten quite as much attention as other Linux mobile efforts.

To get some insight into LiMo, we talked with David Lefty Schlesinger, who chairs the LiMo Foundation's Open Source Committee and works for LiMo member ACCESS as its director of Open Source Technologies.

First rule of public relations: Don't make an announcement when it's going to be drowned out by competing announcements you can't hope to beat. The Wholesale Applications Community announcement put out yesterday was up against not one, but two mobile announcements guaranteed to steal its thunder: Windows 7 Mobile and the MeeGo announcement from Nokia and Intel.

Setting aside the bad timing, let's look at the actual initiative. What is the Wholesale Applications Community? A major initiative from a gaggle of telecom operators to build an open platform for mobile phone users. It combines 24 operators, including AT&T, NTT, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, and many others, with device manufacturers LG Electronics, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. The group's mission is to create a wholesale app ecosystem for deployment across all carriers and devices, rather than the fragmented ecosystem that we have now with apps for various phones and carriers.

February is a great time to visit Barcelona -- the sights, the culture, the history, and of course, the Mobile World Congress. As an astute mobile enthusiast, you've probably noticed that open source platforms, applications and services are cropping up all over the mobile industry. It's no secret that a few of us here are fond of Funambol, thanks to its cross-platform functionality and community involvement.

At the Mobile World Congress, Funambol will unveil new products to interest mobile users and developers.

Stop me if you've heard this one before -- the reason why so many people choose Windows over alternative platforms is because there are too many choices.

All right, hold on to your hats, folks. In a few cases, I think that's an accurate statement. Why? Because people just want to use their computer. I also know that when given a computer running an alternative operating system, this same demographic happily gets on with using the computer.

On the desktop, of course, there's been a long history of vendors pushing proprietary operating systems by default. While it appears that trend will change in the future, it's already changing in the mobile arena.

Microsoft's Robbie Bach is applying the old argument to the new playing field. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, unsurprisingly, thinks this is a bad move on Microsoft's part.

When Google unveiled its mobile operating system and christened it Android, some said it would never go anywhere. When the company announced the Android Developer Challenge and laid out $10 million to kick-start application development, a number of critics declared it a waste of good money.

And when the Android Market made its debut, just days before the release of the first Android phone, many scoffed at the fifty-odd applications available. Today, however, it's Google's turn to chuckle, as the number of available apps steamed past twenty thousand.

When Nokia announced that it was launching the Symbian Foundation to great fanfare, it had within its grasp that rarest of opportunities to move swiftly and become the dominant open source mobile platform. Alas, just one and a half years later, they have seemingly ceded that position to Android. Instead of recognizing the threat from Android and making strategic changes to counter, they instead criticized Google's closed-door development of Android before releasing a line of code themselves. When criticizing competitors, it helps to have your own house in order first.

?In October, the Symbian Foundation released the Symbian kernel sources to the world, and the rest of the world (read: developers) collectively responded, Great. Where's my Android phone? I've often lauded Google for its ability to fuse the marketing, PR and developer benefits of open source projects into one seemless operation. It would seem that Symbian could stand to learn a few things. The question is, is it too late?

I am always tickled when I can write about (and introduce others to) open source applications that solve, quickly and easily, the very real problems that frequently arise when technology manufacturers (or providers) assume that customers use their devices in completely homogenous settings.

So today, it seems, is my lucky day -- today Funambol unleashes version 8 of its nifty open source mobile cloud push and sync software that enables a wide variety of mobile phones (including iPhones, Blackberry, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile devices) to share and sync information with a number of email clients, POP and IMAP mail servers, PIMs, and social networks. And while it's great to wax poetic about the subtle joy that can be had just by syncing your smartphone that wasn't designed to communicate with another software company's email and calendaring application, I'm fortunate enough to be able to share the experience with ten readers in the form of membership invites.

First, though, the important part: What's new in Funambol v8?

When I heard that Funambol was rolling out an open source mobile cloud sync service for mobile VoIP users, I'll be honest -- I wasn't thinking about the open code, or about how much easier it would make contacting people worldwide over a diverse array of devices. I immediately thought of my dad.

He could very well be just like your dad, or mom, or you. He likes gadgets, and if the gadgets beep, flash, or vibrate at a random enough interval to make my mom grind her teeth or clutch her ears, he likes them even more. However, he's got two things working against him -- he's not blessed in the patience department (like my mom, it would seem) and he's got arthritic hands to the point of immobility. As such, his work-issued Blackberry wasn't nearly as useful as his old Palm Pilot when it came to being an electronic memory. It was merely a phone he couldn't dial all that easily.

He was delighted when I showed him Skype, and was flattered when all these young women he didn't know kept calling. The novelty gave way to annoyance when he realized he must know some people on Skype, but finding and connecting with them took patience.

New mVoIP users start with a blank address book, and many mVoIP services can't sync existing contact information from cell phones or other address books. Funambol's mVoIP enables service providers to allow syncing from address books and social networks -- so that an address change made anywhere (say, a contact's Facebook profile or the Funambol web portal) updates all associated devices.