"Jon Rubinstein just made it official during their financial results conference call, folks: Palm is only going to develop webOS devices from now on. Say goodbye to Palm-branded Windows Mobile Devices..."

The Mozilla Foundation has stopped development of a mobile version of its Firefox web browser for Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform. The reason for the decision is that Windows Mobile 7 doesn't support native applications. Until this decision Windows Mobile was one of just two platforms that were supported by Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox.

Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza suggested that, given the strong emergence of free, open-source operating systems, Microsoft might find it difficult to demand licence fees from smart phone manufacturers for the mobile operating software. She also added that the recently introduced Windows Mobile 6.5 was not "a major improvement" from its predecessors.

Samsung is, or soon will be a major player on Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile. When Samsung gets their own open mobile OS, what will happen to other mobile platforms that it is using?

Independent programmers in the community recently achieved Palm's goal of running Linux on Palm devices. Linux is an alternative interface to Palm and Windows Mobile operating systems, which allows you to control and navigate basic Palm device functions.

While Google and its Open Handset Alliance partners would have us believe that it's all about the customer, the Android open source mobile platform is as much about preventing Microsoft, Symbian and Palm from taking up the top position in the mobile operating system space.

Independent programmers in the community recently achieved Palm’s goal of running Linux on Palm devices. Linux is an alternative interface to Palm and Windows Mobile operating systems, which allows you to control and navigate basic Palm device functions. The thrust of their efforts have been with Lifedrive and TX.

This article contains a list of seven valuable--and best of all, free--applications for Windows Mobile devices. Most of 'em work on Windows Mobile Professional smartphones or Pocket PCs, some work on both and a couple are for Windows Mobile Standard. There's an uber RSS reader thingee, a free backup app and more.

Microsoft wishes it could charge for these...

Free/open source software and UNIX to gain more at the expense of Windows based on the latest judgments