Earlier this week at JavaOne, I sat down with Motorola's vice president, software platforms & ecosystem, Christy Wyatt (pictured), to talk about the handset maker's confusing "platform" strategy. Actually, it seems that the "fuzzy" part was a feature and not a bug.

Unlike Sony/Ericsson that has only 2 platforms (a proprietary one and Symbian/UIQ), Motorola's platform diversity comes from the wide range of cell phones it actually makes: from $50 handsets to enterprise secure phones to smartphones. But overall, Wyatt favours "open" platforms like Linux, Symbian/UIQ and Windows (sic!).

I was also surprised to learn that Motorola shipped more than 13 million Linux handsets since its first in 2003 and that the RAZR2 was the first "iconic" and global Linux phone for Motorola. Wyatt also expressed optimism in the consolidation of mobile Linux platforms. There are really only 2 left: LiMo and Google's Android... so fill in the blank!

Finally, Wyatt also mentioned the extension of Motorola's development platform, MOTODEV Studio development, that will support Linux/UIQ and WebUI, in addition to JavaME. Developers will soon be able to create applications for all Motorola's platforms using its single Eclipse based IDE. Inspite of all the various software platforms, MOTO devices have at least one thing in common i.e. Java!

Here's our transcript for our interview with Christy Wyatt:

Christy Wyatt: MOTODEV is a developer environment for across Motorola. It is an open sourced eclipse based developer environment and we’re doing the plug-ins and integration for all of our products across the portfolio into the environment. MOTODEV Studio is connected to MOTODEV the portal and it contains a somewhat live connection so we can let the user know when there are new patches and new things available for the platforms that they are developing on. So, what we have announced today is the next generation of MOTODEV Studio. The next generation IDE with support, obviously still Java that has been the platform we have been supporting all along. We are also making available very soon the Motorola's WebUI plug-ins so this is for doing web based or AJAX based plug-ins or widgets and we also announced that we will be doing support for UIQ developers. So, the UIQ Developers will be able to get there developer environments directly from Motorola.

We also said that we will be making native Linux for a Linux platform available for the end of the year. So, we are increasingly adding platforms incrementally. So our intention in making the tools available now, even though they are very early access, is because we know that there is a very enthusiastic developer community that wants to start working now to bring applications for our mobile Linux products out to market along with the handsets, not three to six months later.

The response has been fantastic from developers. I think that, first of all, there are many different platforms across the industry and Motorola is a reflection of the industry supports multiple platforms. And so having a single consistent environment as a developer back to Motorola is extremely valuable. Having a single developer paradigm across platforms is extremely valuable. The developer community is very supportive of using Eclipse. It is a very high percentage of the commercial and free IDE’s that are on the market that are Eclipse and open sourced based. So it is another testimony toward support of open standard and open source and participating within the community so the response has been fantastic. We have had thousands and thousands of downloads. It has been very well received but it has been predominately Java support so I definitely think that there is a lot of excitement right now about getting the next generation of tools a broadly deployed widgets framework, getting support for UIQ in a single environment so you don’t have to download bits and pieces from four different companies to develop an application for Motorola UIQ based handsets. A lot of enthusiasm.

MOTODEV, as a program, was announced in 2006. It is not quite two years old yet, almost two years old. It is off the charts in growth. We are developing. We are growing the program by at least a thousand a day. At least. It is a very active community. We are very aware of developers. They are actively engaging. They are actively downloading tools, documentation. The response to the program has been tremendous and through MOTODEV we actually support all parts of the life cycle, and not just the tools, although that’s a very valuable part. We also provide support, knowledge base. We also do a lot of go to market support for developers. The mobile community, especially, is a complex ecosystem to participate in. You have to be very laser focused on where you are taking your products and how you are taking it to market. So through our fast track program we do a lot of go to market support, things like PR agencies or access to channels or access to testing and certification programs. So it is at any life cycle for the developer or part of managing.

Messaging is still the number one category. Number two would be entertainment, things like gaming, music, media. I would say full rich multi media would be ranked very high up there, increasingly folks are doing applications with more videos. Higher end gaming, 3D interactive gaming, connected gaming. I think we are seeing a lot more connected applications. I think Evans Data stated recently we’re seeing up to 17% of the global mobile population actually being web developers these days. So, we are seeing a lot more interest in, what folks say, bringing in Web 2.0 types of experiences onto mobile platforms.

If you were to look at Motorola, Motorola is really the reflection of mobile is today. I think there is increasingly awareness of mobile applications and the ability to do enrich user experiences on handsets which require a level of platforming that didn't exist in mobile before. Five years ago, ten years ago. The software on the handset was really embedded software it wasn’t even close to being a mobile operating system that is really where Java was so important to the early phase of the mobile market. I think Motorola’s software strategy today is really to deliver rich user experiences out to our end users. We’ve been huge proponents of open platforms. We have been very vocal about support of Mobile Linux, very vocal about our support of many open platforms. We are also leveraging the ecosystem of other very tried and true commercial platforms like Symbian and Microsoft and again as consistent with the rest of the mobile industry there still is a large percentage of the portfolio that is not yet truly open. That doesn’t have access to native APIs. Now, we are seeing that part of the portfolio in the part segment of the industry overall decreasing. But, there will always be apart of the portfolio that is not on any of the open platforms. Now, as to where we are going. We continue to be a huge proponent of open platforms. You’re going to continue see us invest strategically in those communities where we have the ability to participate in an open forum or open community. With that said, I think if you look at the landscape of the mobile industry today. The operators get a huge vote on what applications and what platforms play a role within their own ecosystems. So to a certain extent, everyone of the handset manufacturers has to have a little diversity across the portfolio in order to respond to this.

Uberpulse: But there is a cost associated to having a Windows, Symbian, UIQ, LIMO, etc. phones?
Christy Wyatt: So many of the ones that you mentioned are very young. And so, I think that we are still in the learning stage about many of the operating systems that you mentioned. I think that in a perfect world, we would love to have one but if you think of the diversity of our portfolio. We are developing handsets better as $50 handsets for emerging markets all the way up to the all singing all dancing consumer driven smart phone you have the enterprise products that have to have rich security frameworks and servicing an entirely different set of categories. And, I don’t think that there is a platform available yet that is as flexible or scalable or diverse enough to cover all of those criteria. And so, I think again there isn’t a handset manufacturer, that I am aware of today, that has 100% of its portfolio on any one platform. And that is really because of the market that we are living in right now. The diversity in —we are not talking about thousands or a couple of million hits a year that we are talking about. We are talking about market of a billion of hits every year so there is a lot of different products.

Android is really exciting to us because of the ecosystem opportunities. I think the early views of the public has seen is very exciting in terms of the kinds of applications or the diversity of the developer community that could participate so I think, as I said, there are many of these platforms that we’re talking about that are relatively young that we are very enthusiastic because they are opened. They are based on open source or open standards and those are the kinds of communities that we said we are most interested in participating. With that said, we just have to wait and see.

Let me touch on the Trolltech piece because I think you brought it up. First of all, we have been doing Linux based handsets since 2003. So we have shipped more than 13 million Linux based handsets in the market. We have been doing this a very long time but it started as a platform in region for a specific set of products within that specific given region.

UberPulse: In China?
Christy Wyatt: Exactly. So, the architecture of that platform, as a whole, has aggressively over the past couple of years to ramp up to the point where we believe that we can support broad ecosystems across multiple products for regions around the world. Last year, we shipped in my mind a landmark product, in the RAZR2 because this was really our first iconic product. It is Linux moving out of the smart phone space and into the iconic segment, the really high volume part of the portfolio and because this was a global launch so this is where we saw Linux as a mobile platform going worldwide. Trolltech and QT have been part of our architecture for a long, long time. That is what we said we are one of the founders of the LiMo foundation. The LiMo Foundation has decided at this point and time stated they are going toward GTK. Actually, it is pretty open for the past year and a half that we were going to have to build to GTK at some point and time. That is obviously something that we are working hard on. We are not on QT4. It is really sort of an older, sort of specialized Motorola version that folks are seeing right now. Developers will see some of it when we make the native Linux APIs available but they will also be very clear on which APIs will be staying for the duration and which APIs will have to move at some point on time as a result to the transition. So with respect to our commitment to LiMo. I think that is a very robust organization. It has a fantastic representation in operators, manufacturers, many of whom are already shipping Linux based handsets, who are shipping tens of millions of Linux based handsets. So this is, although Linux, itself is a relatively young platform in mobile. This is as mature a community as could be within mobile Linux right now. I think we are very optimistic about the progress that is going to happen with our tools within that platform. Android, on a slightly different angle in that they are really focused on the high end rich connected services, experiences, lots of ecosystem focus but at this point in time they are not focusing necessarily in the same place. At some point could I see them converging or could I see the Linux industry as a whole converging. I don’t think we know enough right now about each of those two communities to see how that will unfold. I think we are optimistic given the consolidation of LiPS and LiMo... We are seeing consolidation in the Linux space.

We started doing our first Symbian UIQ handset, I think went to market last year. It was done in Europe for the European market and largely it was a response to the ecosystem of multimedia focused developers and customers that we saw in the European market. It was part of the portfolio and regionally was a part that was not being addressed by the Linux portfolio and had sort of outgrown the other in house proprietary technology today. It was a very robust, very mature ecosystem and it made sense for us to leverage that. I think that we were pleasantly pleased, surprised with our first UIQ product. The user feedback has been fantastic so we started to do subsequent Symbian UIQ products. I think now that you will start to see them start moving outside of Europe and going into other regions. Developers are very excited about this opportunity because there is a very large Symbian developer community and this make that developer community addressable for Motorola products as well.