Yahoo's been taking it's mobile strategy pretty seriously over the course of the past couple years, having zoomed through two revisions of its Go portal app on multiple platforms. They've officially unveiled yet another major version today -- 3.0, to be exact -- featuring a new icon view (in addition to the old-school carousel view) and support for widgets. Widgets, you say? Yep, that's the real meat of today's announcements: Yahoo has opened the floodgates to third party development with its Mobile Developer Platform, promising a future rich with widgets that'll plug into Go and make it even meatier than it already is. eBay, MTV, and MySpace have already crafted widgets for the platform, too, so it's a promising start. Yahoo! Go 3.0 is available now for a wide variety of S60 and BlackBerry devices, and we're guessing that Windows Mobile will be following on shortly.

Yahoo has released a set of free tools that it says will help developers tackle the problem of making apps work across hundreds of different handsets.

The offering doesn't quite have the scope of arch rival Google's Android platform, however.

Instead, Yahoo is to provide 'widgets' to help content providers produce content to run within its Go mobile application or other mobile browser software.

Ultimately, Yahoo hopes to make money by selling advertising around the content produced using its tools.

Yahoo is just the latest in a long line of companies hoping to attract content providers to their various platforms. Others include the likes of Nokia, Microsoft Apple and Google.

However, unlike those four companies Yahoo is not in a position to control the phone operating system, which may prove a barrier to it establishing a truly ubiquitous content platform.

Yahoo would no doubt argue that its approach is precisely what's required to breakdown differences between the various OSes.

OpenMoko, the guys behind the 100% open source software and hardware Neo 1973, are going to introduce the Neo FreeRunner at CES. Two versions will be made, each has a 500 MHz processor, WiFi, accelerometers, 3D hardware acceleration, but one will be triband 850 MHz with the other being 900 MHz. The only Linux based mobile phone platform worth talking about is Android and I feel that people are not gong to give Sean Moss-Pultz the attention his work deserves.

The entire Linux smartphone arena baffles me. I ultimately want to understand it and group all of the players into one catagorey “Linux smartphones,” but that space is even more fragmented than Java.