Azingo | Open Mobile Linux Software Platform and Services


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There are more than two billion mobile subscribers worldwide consuming one trillion minutes of service and purchasing more than one billion mobile phones annually. New products introduced in 2007, such as Apple’s iPhone, have demonstrated the merits of integrating the Internet with a powerful mobile phone user interface to deliver new content to mobile users and new service revenues to operators and web content providers. Yet, ninety percent of new mobile phones are designed around proprietary software operating systems that are economically and technologically incapable of keeping up with the never-ending demands for new sophisticated applications and services.

As a result, operators and handset manufacturers are seeking to replace the legacy mobile phone software that powers the majority of phones today. Cumulatively, 272M Linux handsets are expected to be sold between 2008 and 2012, representing a 25% share of the open handset operating system market in 2012. With the sheer scale of the global industry seeking an open software platform, its no wonder that industry analysts project the mobile software and services market to exceed $6B by 2009 with open platforms as the fastest growing sector of the market.

Factors driving industry growth include:

Growth in Handset Shipments - analysts expect handsets shipments to reach more than 1.2 billion units in 2008, at an annual growth rate of over 20%.
Product Complexity - driven by Moore’s Law, mobile handset hardware continues to improve its price/performance, enabling manufacturers to pack more and more functions into a single handset. For example, cameras are becoming standard and new features will be added to support music and mobile TV.
Convergence of Cellular and Broadband Wireless - users will use different networks for different applications on the same handset.
Increased Velocity of New Services – the growth in rich, mobile Internet content and mobile multi-media are driving new services to be deployed on mobile devices.
Branded Services – Operators, handset manufacturers and even web content providers want to represent customized and branded interfaces to their subscribers with the underlying functionality to support their specific service offerings.
Shorter Product Life Cycles - the number of mobile handset models is increasing and the average product life cycle of a mobile handset is shrinking.
Network-Aware Applications – Mobile phone applications today are generally standalone in nature. The mobile applications of the future will be social and content-driven, sharing information in a way that is far more tightly integrated and seamless with the mobile device and an individual’s mobile needs.
Configurable User Experience Interfaces – Operators are demanding easier-to-use, animated, user interfaces that can quickly, efficiently and seamlessly apply and support operator branded services across divergent handsets, consumer segments, and geographies.

All of these forces are fueling exponential increases in the complexity of software development, integration and testing in an industry that is already aggressively striving to reduce costs.

To date, the mobile phone software market has been served by proprietary, embedded operating systems from Symbian and Microsoft, often designed for high-end phones. To help accelerate a standard, open software platform, leaders in the mobile phone industry have created the Limo Foundation. LiMo’s mission is to guide the collaborative development of an open mobile phone operating system based on Linux. Such a platform would benefit from sophisticated web and multimedia capabilities while creating a cost-competitive, common industry platform able to reduce fragmentation, leverage open-source technologies and development communities and reduce the costs of developing and supporting specialized legacy mobile platforms.

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