US / Australia :  Open Kernel Labs announced the availability of OKL4 for FIC's OpenMoko Neo1973 smart phone and the FancyPants advanced GUI platform from Fluffy Spider Technologies (FST). The products will be demoed at the upcoming ARM Developers Conference (Booth 511).

The OpenMoko Neo1973 smart phone is the first phone based totally on open source software. In combination with OKL4, the phone features multiple graphical applications running on different virtual machines, all on a single processor core.

OKL4 is an advanced open source microkernel architecture providing virtualization, high performance IPC and support for user-level device drivers. This application of OKL4 demonstrates its ability to deliver smart phone features, at a fraction of the cost typical of most handsets, while significantly improving reliability and security with significantly less impact on performance than alternative approaches.

"OpenMoko and Open Kernel Labs are each providing technology to accelerate innovation in the mobile device market ", said Steve Subar, president and Co-founder of Open Kernel Labs. " The OpenMoko smart phone makes obvious the benefits of how OKL4 is being deployed to decrease cost while improving functionality and performance."

The user interface, created with FST's FancyPants, demonstrates the ability for third parties to easily develop advanced graphics and include high-performance multimedia applications for the OpenMoko software, proving the platform's robustness to OEMs of high-end and low-cost mass market devices. This is the first product coming from the joint development agreement signed by OK and FST on July 25, 2007.

In addition, this is the first device to illustrate the ability to simultaneously run multiple FancyPants applications on multiple operating systems running on the OKL4 microkernel on a single processor core. The result is a seamless, user-configurable interface with a very small footprint that reduces hardware resource requirements and costs.

About Fluffy Spider Technologies

FST specializes in providing advanced GUI and high-performance multimedia products for embedded application development, backed by comprehensive custom development services.

Since 1995, clients include Toshiba, VeriFone, Ericsson, HP, Optus, Vodafone and GEC. FST also has a Memorandum of Understanding with NICTA - Australia's ICT Research Centre of Excellence.