Both are generating buzz at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona.
While Google's partners demonstrated prototypes of future handsets based on its Android operating system, the LiMo Foundation - a competing consortium that is developing a Linux-based open source operating platform - showed off 18 handsets from seven companies, some ready for market.
The promise of both Android and LiMo is that they will allow developers to quickly write applications for cellphones without paying licensing fees as with proprietary software from companies such as Microsoft or Symbian - a development that could speed the drive to integrate the Internet into your cellphone. And they both are pooling industry players from handset manufacturers to mobile operators, software companies to chip makers.
The initiatives' objectives are widely overlapping, which is reflected in the number of companies that are members of both, including LG Electronics, Motorola and Samsung as well as chipmaker Texas Instruments. In all, Android has 32 members; OHA 34. So far, there are no signs, however, that they will pool their efforts.
"These companies are united in a deep philosophical way around an operating system, with a group of industry leaders are sharing technology to create a new operating system for handsets," Morgan Gillis, executive direct of the LiMo Foundation said on Wednesday. "LiMo is real technology making a real platform that goes straight to handsets.'
A key difference between LiMo and Android is that Android is being presented to its partners as a completed operating system built from the ground up, whereas the partners in LiMo have developed the software using components from the various member companies and it is being finished as a collaborative project, said John Rizzo, a LiMo board member who is vice president for research and development strategy for the US branch of Japan's Aplix.
"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. A future goal of the platform is providing interoperability" between various wireless devices and services - providing higher quality content.
The commercial handsets announced by LiMo include models from Motorola, NEC, Panasonic Mobile Communications and Samsung.
At least some of those models contain components of the final operating system and not the entire platform. While Android's platform is complete, no Android handsets have been announced. The Android prototypes on show in Barcelona are by chipmakers Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, who have integrated their chips with the operating system.
One of LiMo's members is McCafee, the maker of antivirus software, which sees an opportunity to be in on the ground floor of a cellphone operating system, a position they were never able to achieve in the PC market.
"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 in the mobile phone arena as Internet applications become more prominent, with the trend already taking off in Asia, Kouznetsov said.
Consultant John Strand was skeptical that either initiative was going to have much of an impact on the mobile market - noting that primacy would depend on the number devices they can get on and that is tough in a fragmented market. Nokia, which controls 40 percent of the handset market, relies on Symbian, a proprietary operating system that 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, of the Copenhagen, Denmark-based Strand Consulting. "And Android, ... all of those companies are dreaming of coming into the mobile industry but none have had success, besides Qualcomm."
Of course, LiMo argues that its platform will encourage the proliferation of applications, and that is the hope of members of Google's Open Hand Alliance.
Martin Cooper, the CEO of the wireless company ArrayComm and considered the father of the cellphone, said initiatives like LiMo would speed the integration of the Internet into mobile devices because it would get developers creating new applications. But he also said that obstacles still existed to the long-heralded 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."