Monday December 10th, the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) completed the release of 1.0 specifications, to targets interoperability and marketability of Linux-based mobile phones through shared open standards and implementations. LiPS forum have been founded in 2005 and include operators and services providers from France, Italy and UK, in addition equipment and Chip manufacturers, and software vendors.

With Android release, LiPS published an FAQ on the differences between their standardization effort and OHA :

LiPS and Android both seek to reduce fragmentation among Linux-based mobile platforms. LiPS seeks unity through open standards, while Android/OHA does so through shared code.

Effort for Mobile linux stardization isn’t new at all, and beside the LiPS we count also the ELC Mobile Linux Initiative (MLI), Linux Mobile Foundation (LiMo), the embedded linux consortium, and the Gnome embedded initiative. There are also many others individual efforts by companies acting in the linux mobile business. According to ABI research, by 2012 there will be approximately 127 million Linux smartphones shipped each year.

It’s true that OHA and Android are boosted by Google, so should the LiPS profit from Android or should Android learn from the LiPS ?

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Ascender, leading provider of advanced font products for mobile handsets and member of the OHA, announced the “Droid Fonts”, a set of seven typefaces specially designed for the Android for optimal quality and comfort on mobile handsets. The Droid fonts family have been optimized for a better rendering in application menus, web browsers and for other screen text.

“Ascender is proud to be providing the font solution to the Android platform built by the Open Handset Alliance. We believe that handset manufacturers, wireless carriers and application developers will be very happy with the fonts provided and we look forward to addressing the future font needs across the platform,” said Ira Mirochnick, President of Ascender Corporation. “We are also very excited that the platform supports our Ascender Compact Asian Font solution (ACAF) which will make it easy for manufacturers to implement additional high quality Asian fonts in a small footprint.”

According to the press release, the Droid family of fonts consists of Droid Sans, Droid Sans Mono and Droid Serif. Each contains extensive character set coverage including Western Europe, Eastern/Central Europe, Baltic, Cyrillic, Greek and Turkish support. The Droid Sans regular font also includes support for Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean support for the GB2312, Big 5, JIS 0208 and KSC 5601 character sets respectively.

It’s interesting to get Asian fonts supported for Android especially Japanese, Chinese and Korean, this also reflect the Google strategy to target the largest population. But what I notice here is that Android is missing middle eastern fonts such Arabic and Hebrew, in addition to other Asian fonts. So you will be missing these for current release, but we will probably see them supported in future releases according to Ascender.

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Just noticed today a press release planned for next monday (19th November) by Synaptics, member of the OHA. Synaptics Inc., a leading developer of capacitive-based human interface solutions for mobile computing, communications and entertainment devices; and today they are announcing the touch interface driver for Android SDK. A good news for developers who were looking for a way to test the touch interface capabilities with Android SDK.

Synaptics is the only touch interface company in the alliance, and they are already providing mobile solutions for Onyx, Pantech, Samsung and many others. According to the press release, Synaptics will provide mobile handset designers with a powerful yet easy to use tool to develop advanced, multi-touch gestures for the Android platform.

“Synaptics is proud to be a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance,” said, Joseph Virginia, Vice President, Corporate Marketing and Handheld Business of Synaptics. “Our contribution to the Android platform will help bring dynamic touch user interfaces to everyone in the mobile market. By creating an open environment conducive to collaboration and partnering, the Alliance will allow key influencers to deliver innovative devices and services to meet the needs of the fast-changing mobile industry.”

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We used to talk about Android, Google and the OHA without talking in details about the other partners member of the alliance and their participation. Many people who started flirting with Android technology started asking why Google is creating another Java standard (Dalvik) ? why they didn’t use the JavaME Standard? and what about old mobile applications written in the JavaMe standard, will they be supported on Android ?

Esmertec, member of the OHA, got the answer to this question. Beside contributing in the OHA initiative with their OMA applications (MMS, WAP, DRM, SyncML, and IM), Esmertec is also providing a commercial Jbed Virtual Machine (JVM) to member of the Alliance on demand. In other words, you won’t probably have access to JVM, but if you have an mobile application in JavaME standard it will easily run on Android platform thanks to Esmertec.

Esmertec’s JVM will bring easily thousands of existing Java ME applications to the Android mobile platform. So the solution already exist, even commercial, but the question still for Android’s applications and how to port them to JavaMe standard. Write once, use everywhere, isn’t always true, but isn’t impossible too. Anyway there is still someone who will have to make an extra effort to fit with the new situation.

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