With LiMo’s recent announcement that Verizon had hopped onto their Board of Directors, things are starting to heat up between the LiMo platform and Google’s competing product, Android. Both are open-source Linux-based platforms, and both are aiming to rock the handset market sometime in the next year or so.

LiMo is Linux-based. Android is Linux-based. But they’re far from the same. Below, I’ll try to explain some of the key differences without going too heavy on the tech jargon. (Fiiine. It gets a bit heavy for a paragraph or two. But I’ll avoid it where possible.)

1) Backers/Funding

LiMo: The LiMo platform is backed by the LiMo Foundation, which was founded by Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Panasonic, Samsung, and Vodafone, and has since added 34 other members to the list. In membership fees alone ($400k a year for each of the 9 “Core” members, and $40k a year for each of the 25 “Associate” members) , the foundation has raised at least 4.6 million before adding in whatever funds the founding members pitched in at the start.

Android: Android is backed by the Open Handset Alliance (OHA). OHA has 33 founding members besides Google, including 3 of the LiMo Foundation’s 7 founders (namely Samsung, Motorola, and NTT DoCoMo). No word on Android’s budget so far. While the way Google flashes cash with things like the $10 Million Dollar Android Developer Challenge doesn’t absolutely prove that their budget is larger, it certainly implies it.

In other words: Both platforms have massive companies as partners, and presumably a good amount of money behind them. Android is largely touted as a Google project, where LiMo isn’t really pushed as being under the wing of a single company.

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