Seven big names in the online and mobile industry have banded together in an effort to release a new standard of mobile application software that will be easily available for mobile users everywhere.

ARM, a British company responsible for designing chips for cellphones, announced its plans during the fourth annual ARM Developers' Conference held this week in Sta Clara, California. ARM, along with Samsung, Texas Instruments, Mozilla, Marvell, MontaVista, and Movial have decided to design a Linux-based open source platform to base the next generation of mobile applications on.

The purpose of this new collaboration is the hope that they will be able to create products and technology at a quicker pace with the help of the online community by developing enhanced applications through this open source platform.

ARM plans to release the full platform by 2008 and expects that the first devices bearing this new platform will be available by 2009. However, some critics were saying that the iPhone already has the exact same capabilities as the ones planned by ARM and the other companies.

However, the potential of this new platform is still very high considering the amount of applications open source programmers can contribute to the effort. Mike Inglis, an execute VP at ARM had this to say about the collaboration:

Today's consumers are very knowledgeable about technology, want to be connected to the Internet and access multimedia content and applications anywhere, at anytime, yet they do not want to be restricted by short battery life and inadequate features that will limit their experiences.

By stepping up the collaboration among key stakeholders in the mobile market, we will be able to jointly deliver the devices and applications with the cutting-edge innovation consumers have come to expect.