The Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum will today release its first specifications in an effort to encourage people to develop more applications for Linux-based mobile phones.

The specs, which include a reference model, address book, voice call enabler, text input method APIs and user interface services such as widget sets, are expected to be posted on the LiPS website, reports TechWorld.

The LiPS forum, launched in late 2005, is working to standardise a layer of software that will make it easier to create mobile applications that can run on any Linux phone. “The reality of the market is it’s coincidental that different phones run Linux because an application developer

wouldn’t be in the position to write something … to work on all of them,” Bill Weinberg, general manager for business development at the LiPS Forum told TechWorld.

“The LiPS standard is designed to solve that.” The LiPS Forum chose to base the user interface framework on Gnome’s GTK toolkit, dealing a blow to Trolltech, which offers an application platform and user interface for Linux mobile phones.

Weinberg said more companies are using Gnome, however. “Trolltech has done well in the mobile space but we’re seeing a trend toward Gnome,” he said.

The forum defined APIs on top of Gnome’s GTK, optimising it for the mobile usage model, he said. -Tectonic