Companies join forces over Android

By Colleen Barry

updated 6:48 p.m. ET Feb. 13, 2008

BARCELONA, Spain - The race is on: A consortium of 32 companies has joined a classic battle for primacy with their demonstration of mobile phones to compete with devices that will run Google Inc.'s fledgling Android operating system.

The LiMo Foundation — which includes such software companies as McAfee Corp. and Purple Labs and telecommunications giants such as Samsung — showed off 18 handsets Wednesday at the World Mobile Conference in Barcelona. Some of the devices are ready for market.

Just two days earlier, also in Barcelona, chip makers Texas Instruments Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. began demonstrating prototypes of handsets based on Android — for which no one offered a launch date.

The promise of both operating systems is that — because they are based on open-source software — they will allow developers to quickly and freely add new applications. Anyone hoping to create new applications for competing proprietary programs from Microsoft Corp., Palm Inc., Research in Motion Ltd. or Nokia Corp.'s Symbian must pay licensing fees.

(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

That openness could speed the drive to integrate the Internet into mobile phones. It's already drawing numerous handset manufacturers, mobile operators, software companies to chip makers.

The LiMo Foundation, which draws its name from Linux and mobile phones, was launched last February in an effort to build a mobile phone platform that would allow more devices to work together. Google also began working on Android last year with industry partners, in the Open Hand Alliance.

The initiatives overlap in many ways, which is reflected in the number of companies participating in both, including LG Electronics, Motorola and Samsung as well as chipmaker Texas Instruments. In all, LiMo has 32 members to Open Hand's 34. And the numbers in both are growing.

So far, however, there are no signs they will pool their efforts.

"These companies are united in a deep philosophical way around an operating system, with a group of industry leaders who are sharing technology to create a new operating system for handsets," Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation, said of that collaborative. "LiMo is real technology making a real platform that goes straight to handsets."

A key difference between LiMo and Android is that Google is presenting Android to its partners as a completed operating system, whereas the partners in LiMo have incorporated components from the various member companies and are finishing it together, said John Rizzo, a LiMo board member who is vice president for research and development strategy for the U.S. branch of Japan's Aplix Corp.

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