South Korea planning a national effort to create a new mobile platform

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The government of South Korea is reported to be organizing a confederation of the country’s biggest mobile manufacturers including LG and Samsung for developing a range of open mobile phone platforms based on cloud computing to compete with products from companies such as Apple and Google.

Reports suggest that the deputy minister of the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, Kim Jae-hong, said this Monday that his government has planned to create operating systems which are web-centric, first for personal computers and laptops and then subsequently for mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.

Kim said that the group will innovate in the development of a new type of platform which is now being seen as one of the next-generation products. He expects this to build an advantage for the country’s mobile companies which they do not currently have in the mobile devices market, currently monopolized by Apple and Google.

According to rumors, Samsung, a very successful smartphone manufacturer which uses Google’s Android as the OS for its devices, could have decided to join this national project after Google’s plans for acquiring Motorola Mobility became public. Motorola is one of the biggest competitors of the Korean company.

Google has stated that its takeover of Motorola, with the estimated 24,000 patents that it holds along with some that are pending, will primarily be used in the defense of the manufacturers which use Android in their smartphones or tablets, such as LG and Samsung. At least at the moment, most of the Android manufacturers have publicly come out to support the acquisition.

However, many fear that in due course, Google may start giving preference to providing Android updates and development features via Motorola, or maybe even come out into the market as a hardware manufacturer.

Kim stated that the possibility of Google entering the smartphone market in the near future cannot be overruled. He alluded to the scenario in which Google may want to follow the model pursued by Apple and deploy Motorola to manufacture official Google phones which will run Android.

In addition to this, another factor which could motivate Samsung to jump into the project is the company’s multiple and increasing ongoing legal battles with Apple over alleged patent infringements which constitute over a dozen different court cases in nine different countries.

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