Marvell announces free development platform for mobile devices

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, chip manufacturer Marvell has announced the free Kinoma development platform. This will reportedly enable developers to write applications for a range of mobile devices with various different operating systems. The platform will be offered under an open source licence in the future to "encourage broad industry adoption" says Marvell, but the company does not specify which licences will be used.

Marvell says that applications developed with Kinoma are integrated with the hardware at the same level as the operating system, which reportedly allows Kinoma applications to perform well, even on slow hardware. The software know-how required for the development platform is provided by software company Kinoma, recently purchased by Marvell, whose team of 12 developers previously created software for Palm OS and for Sony's e-book reader.

The Kinoma Play start screen As a first product developed with Kinoma, Marvell has presented Kinoma Play, a social media browser that incorporates multiple applications such as a browser, gallery, media player and clients for Twitter and Facebook. The company website offers a video which shows Kinoma Play in action. The software is already available for Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile devices and costs about $30. Users can register at the Kinoma website to receive an email notification when the public beta of Kinoma Play for Android becomes available. Developers can also register to receive a similar availability notification for the Kinoma SDK.

(djwm)