LiMo Foundation gets ready for next-generation platform

The next version of the LiMo Linux-based mobile platform is getting closer to launch, and a number of operators are promising handsets during 2009, the LiMo Foundation said today.

All the components that make up Release 2 have been delivered on time by the contributing members, according to the foundation. The new version will provide better multimedia support, location-based services, device management and enhanced security.

But making life easier for developers is the most important difference, according to Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight.
"With Release 2 there is a far greater level of consistency, which makes it far easier to develop applications and move them from device to device," he said.

But commercial phones won't be ready until the end of the year at the earliest. LiMo is expected to show reference designs that conform to Release 2 at the Mobile World Congress, according to Blaber. The conference opens Feb. 16 in Barcelona.

There will be demonstrations of mobile Web applications and widgets, touch-based user interfaces, mobile TV and high-resolution cameras at the show, according to the LiMo site, which doesn't provide any additional details. Members will also be showcasing toolkits for developers who want to create applications for LiMo handsets, it said.

But the LiMo Foundation isn't just making headway on the platform side. NTT DoCoMo, Orange, SK Telecom, Telefónica, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone will all launch devices this year, according to the foundation.

"It's positive news for the LiMo Foundation, and what it does is underline the fact that although operators are looking at other platforms in the near term, LiMo is still part of operators' plans," said Blaber.

The fact that LiMo isn't dominated by one vendor and has an underlying service strategy of its own -- which in some cases can compete with operator interests -- makes it an attractive alternative to Google's Android, Nokia's Symbian and Microsoft's Windows Mobile, according to Blaber.

LiMo has become a tool that operators can use to try to keep those vendors in check, according to Malik Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media. The operators are sending the message that LiMo gives them an alternative to other platforms, he said.

The increased competition will be good for users, resulting in cheaper phones, and more and better services to choose from, according to Saadi.

IDG.net

Amazon eases cloud control

When Amazon's Elastic Cloud was in its infancy, the only management tools available were a set of Java-based command-line applications. The set was comprehensive: You had complete control over and access to Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Moreover, you could create and manipulate the ancillary components of the cloud: key-pairs, elastic IP addresses, and so on. As capable as the tools were, however, they were out of pace with the very Web-based world that they served.

Graphical alternatives have since appeared. Elastic Fox (available from Amazon's Web Services developer site), a free plug-in for the Firefox browser, is a popular tool for creating and supervising AMIs. It provides virtually all the capabilities of the command-line tools, but in an easy-to-navigate browser interface.

[Learn more about Amazon Web Services in the InfoWorld Test Center analysis: "Diving deep into Amazon Web Services."]

Commercial GUI-based cloud-management systems are available as well. Examples are RightScale and Elastra, which add features that enhance the creation and deployment of AMIs beyond what is available with the freeware tools.

Into this arena, Amazon has trotted out the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Management Console. Currently in beta, the AWS Management Console is a browser-based dashboard for Elastic Cloud that -- unlike Elastic Fox -- is not restricted to Firefox. The Console currently supports Firefox 2.0 or later, Internet Explorer 7.0 or later (though I have run it in 6.0), and Safari 3.0 or later. Like Elastic Fox, however, the AWS Console is free; all you need is an AWS account with access to Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) services to get started.

In the clouds

The AWS Console is arranged in IDE fashion, with a navigation pane on the left and workspace panes on the right. The navigation pane holds links pointing to the services provided by the console. The workspace panes comprise the dashboard itself, where you actually interact with the cloud and track the status of in- progress operations.

The AWS Console is primarily a control panel for launching and monitoring AMIs. Before you start an AMI, however, you'll need to create an RSA key-pair. For Linux images, a key-pair is needed so that SSH can provide you with a secure log-in to the running instance. For Windows images, the Elastic Cloud infrastructure uses the key-pair to generate an image's administrator's password. (The key-pair consists of a public and a private key. AWS encrypts the password with the public key. You have to have the private key to decrypt that password; otherwise you'll be unable to log in to your Windows instance.)