Companies join forces over Android

"The platform is made up of existing, proven components," Rizzo said. "Part of the effort is to provide a cost-effective platform for everyone involved."

The LiMo-equipped handsets shown Wednesday in Barcelona include models from Motorola Inc., NEC Corp., Panasonic Mobile Communications and Samsung. Each contains just some pieces of the still-evolving platform.

Consultant John Strand of Strand Consulting in Copenhagen, Denmark, was skeptical that either initiative would have much impact on the mobile market because primacy depends on getting onto a majority of devices, which is tough in a fragmented market.

A formidable obstacle looms in the form of Nokia, which controls 40 percent of the handset market and relies on Symbian, a proprietary operating system it partially owns.

"LiMo is just a group of people trying to create an alternative to Symbian and Microsoft. But Microsoft gets out to more phones and has a bigger development community," said Strand.

Antivirus software maker McAfee is eager to be on the ground floor of an operating system with LiMo, never having done that with a computer platform.

"This is a unique opportunity for us to be involved from day one. We've been half a step behind the bad guys, now we can be half a step ahead," said Victor Kouznetsov, senior vice president for McAfee's mobile security solutions.

Data protection is increasingly important on mobile phones as Internet applications become more prominent, and the trend has already taken off in Asia, Kouznetsov said.

Martin Cooper, the CEO of wireless company ArrayComm Inc. and an early developer of mobile phone technology, agreed that collaboratives will help developers create more new applications. But he said barriers remain to the digital revolution — chiefly the cost of data transmission.

"Digital was supposed to change our lives. It hasn't happened yet," Cooper said. "I'm here to say that the revolution has started. It will take a long time. Believe it or not, revolution takes about a generation. This generation has started now."

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