That could cause pain for proprietary phone platforms, like Windows Mobile or Symbian, as well as other attempts to do mobile Linux, such as the LiMo Foundation, he says.

FORBES: In The Air

Linaro's outputs will accelerate the abundance of new consumer products that use Linux-based distributions such as Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu and webOS in conjunction with advanced semiconductor SoCs to provide the new features consumers desire at the lowest possible power consumption.

ENGADGET: ARM, Samsung, IBM, Freescale, TI and more join to form Linaro, speed rollout of Linux-based devices