The battle for the handset OS has entered a new phase. Six of the world's biggest vendors and operators have jointly thrown their weight behind Mobile Linux in the battle for the fast-growing smartphone market.
Motorola, Samsung, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic, NEC and Vodafone last week announced the world's first global version of the open source mobile platform.
They will form a new body to foster growth of a mobile Linux eco-system, which they said promised lower development costs and increased flexibility for developers and operators.
IDC senior analyst personal systems Manny Lopez said the group was clearly 'looking for an alternative' to the two major providers of smartphone platforms, Microsoft and Nokia.
The prize is leadership of the lucrative top-end smartphone market, which is expected to expand from 100 million units in 2006 to 250 million in 2010.
Right now, Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform is the growth leader, despite having only 4% global market share in Q1, according to Gartner.
Jason Lim, regional director for Microsoft mobile and embedded devices group, said sales for 2006 were expected to double over last year, when five million devices were shipped.
He said the jump in sales, after years of battling to win acceptance in mobile, was because Microsoft had taken on board 'learnings about partnerships and how we build an eco-system.'
Lim said operators in virtually every Asian market are selling Windows-based devices. China Mobile already sells 15 different models, while NTT DoCoMo will launch its first device by the end of the year. Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi said although Linux currently outsold Windows worldwide, 80% of these sales were in Japan.
She said the biggest advantage of mobile Linux would be in cost, but warned that 'standardizing Linux is not an easy task and even if successful with that it needs to be seen how they intend to standardize Java' on the layer above.