Mobile World Congress The jockeying for dominance in mobile Linux developer platforms has taken a fresh twist with key announcements from two leading players arm wrestling for advantage.

Mobile Linux vendor MontaVista said it has joined forces with mobile user interface developer Movial to offer a developer toolkit for mobile web applications. MontaVista's mobile Linux rival Wind River, meanwhile, demonstrated a prototype Android mobile device, heralded by the company as the industry's "first official Android platform demonstration".

The toolkit also includes Movial's Scratchbox and MontaVista DevRocket development tools. The first version of the combined toolkit for Texas Instruments' (TI) OMAP platform is expected before the end of March with further versions for MontaVista Professional Edition to follow later this year.

Wind River's Android demo also uses TI's OMAP platform and is intended to capitalize on Wind River's self-proclaimed position as "Linux commercialization partner" for the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) - the industry group set up to promote Android. Marvell Semiconductor, Qualcomm, ARM, NEC and STMicroelectronics were showing early versions of devices using Google's Linux-based Android specification.

The emphasis in the Android demos is on the possibilities of putting web applications on mobile devices with Linux as the underlying operating system.®

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