MWC 2009
The LiMo Foundation has been talking up its Linux platform for a couple of years now. At first, it wasn't an actual platform, just a club of companies that each used Linux; a club with a an apparent open-door policy.
However, they've always claimed to be working on one unified LiMo Linux platform and this year they claim they've done it. However, LiMo's strategy is wildly different from platforms such as Android. There is no user interface as part of LiMo Linux itself. Rather, LiMo Linux is just the low-level OS part, and companies using it are expected to build their own user interfaces using an interface builder tool such as Glade.
Samsung phones running LiMo Linux
LiMo Foundation was showing off a number of LiMo phones at MWC this year, including a Samsung Omnia, Samsung i780 (Epix), and an LG similar to the Incite. Each was running the respective company's standard user interface on top of LiMo Linux. A crude status bar at the top was the only real visual cue that these were running Linux and not proprietary software (not that we doubt the LiMo folks.)
The Samsungs were running a version of TouchWiz. It was clearly designed for full-touch, so it didn't take advantage of the soft keys on the Epix, for example. It was speedy and fairly feature-complete. It even had some nice little animation between screens. Samsung says they plan to ship a LiMo phone this year, and based on how far along the software seems to be, that seems totally feasible.
LG's LiMo phone looked like an Incite, but they called it the "Atos-L". The LG software was clearly not very far along. Of the two units we tried, one was painfully slow (as in 5 seconds to respond to each button press and 10-20 seconds to load each new screen) and the other only had the top-level menu working; nothing else.
Still, we could see that most of the features were there (on the one) including a WebKit-based browser that looked promising. The interface looked much like the standard LG finger-touch interface you might find on a Prada phone or Vu.
Here's a video tour of all three phones:
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