Apple turned up the heat in the mobile market last week when it unveiled its new iPad mobile computing device. Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, has responded to Apple's product launch with a candid appraisal of Linux's strengths and weaknesses in the mobile market relative to Apple's mobile operating system.

One of the major themes that emerged from this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was Linux, with new Linux-based handset platforms on show and various applications and services for mobile Linux. Could this mean that Linux is likely to be a major rival for other mobile operating systems such as Symbian?

Broadcom said Linux is gaining momentum in mobile phones and that it would work with LiMo Foundation members to address power consumption, size and cost, in an effort to achieve widespread adoption of Linux-based handsets.

The LiMo Foundation on Monday launched its LiMo Platform, a Linux-based software stack for mobile phones that is designed to be device-independent. Several handsets already are in the works that make use of the platform. The Foundation also announced that Texas Instruments has joined as a core member.

The executive director of the LiMo Foundation discusses his group's efforts to create and establish an open handset platform built on Linux.

In an announcement Monday at its user conference in Istanbul, Turkey, the foundation named Stormy Peters, who co-founded the foundation and formerly managed the open source program at Hewlett-Packard, to be the group's new executive director.

TapRoot Systems is demonstrating its telephony middleware for Linux/Qtopia-based mobile phones at the Linux Mobile Communications Conference this week in Beijing. TapRoot's director of product management, stated, "Development of Linux mobile phones is on the rise and is changing the landscape of the mobile phone industry. Our LinuxTel telephony software is a critical piece."

On Monday, May 23rd, we'll start off with registration and breakfast from 7-10am to give you plenty of time to get settled and catch up with other people working on MeeGo Linux, before we start the keynote at 10am. Rather than having several small keynotes, we decided to have one big keynote with many participants.

During the LinuxWorld expo in San Francisco, I met with Linux Foundation president Jim Zemlin to talk about the future of the open-source Linux operating system and the impact it will have on emerging mobile and embedded technologies.