MeeGo 1.1 will be available soon for the Nokia N900 smartphone, which will be able to boot into either the MeeGo or Maemo flavors of Linux. Meanwhile, Aava Mobile, which is porting MeeGo to its Intel Atom N6xx based Aava Mobile smartphone reference design, joined MeeGo's overseer, the Linux Foundation.

Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza suggested that, given the strong emergence of free, open-source operating systems, Microsoft might find it difficult to demand licence fees from smart phone manufacturers for the mobile operating software. She also added that the recently introduced Windows Mobile 6.5 was not "a major improvement" from its predecessors.

There are many Linux based mobile platforms available today: Maemo, Openmoko and Android. Of these, it is probably Android that has created the most noise in and out of open sources circles. Until now however there have not been many successful devices running Google's mobile OS, and the ones that exist didn't present much of a challenge to the iPhone. Things are starting to change however.

"After one year spent using my (pretty old) cell phone for more than just sms and audio calls, I understand better some of the new challenges that the free software movement have to face. I already wrote about the implications of GPLv3 on mobile handsets, but that post only scratches the surface of the issues..."

Last we heard form Openmoko, it was packing and shipping the open-source FreeRunner for an early July release. So, here we are in early July and wouldn't you know it, the FreeRunner will be available for order starting Friday, July 4 with shipping to begin on Monday, July 7. As for details, we got 'em.

The new Purple Magic Linux 3G Linux reference feature phone offers video telephony, music playback, high-speed Internet browsing and video streaming at below US$100 price tag.

Google could be heading for a showdown with Sun over the way Android, Google's new mobile phone software platform, handles Java.

Linux started out on desktops and servers, but has now shipped on about 20 million mobile phones. Ever wonder how it made the jump? In a new whitepaper, embedded industry pioneer Jim Ready offers a concise technical retrospective on Linux's transition into a mobile phone OS.