Imagine developing applications for mobile phones without having to deal with all the fragmentation in the industry revolving around myriad operating systems and platforms.
That’s what Movial, based in Helsinki, Finland, is trying to accomplish through the release of its Movial IXS Toolkit, based on Texas Instruments’ OMAP3430 processor. The toolkit is a Linux solution designed to allow Web developers and designers to create mobile device user interfaces using common Web-based technologies.
In a press release today, Movial said that by leveraging TI’s high performance OMAP platform and its advanced Graphics Accelerator, the Movial IXS Toolkit enables Web developers and designers to create user interfaces that provide new, value-added and differentiated services and superior user experiences.
“Web developers can use the same tools they have been using over 10 years now,” said Tomi Rauste, president of Movial Creative Technologies. “It’s very easy.”
There’s large agreement that mobile browsing experiences have been lousy, with the iPhone being an exception. Movial’s user interface makes the mobile browser much better and desktop-like, he said. It doesn’t imitate the desktop on the mobile, but it makes it easier to use.
Among other things, the Movial technology allows for mashups on mobile devices, so developers can combine information sources from the Internet. For example, if you’re listening to a song on your media player, the client at the same time can pull information from the Internet about the band.