Wildseed, an American company that was the first to offer a Linux-based mobile phone in the US has been bought by America Online. Wildseed has been targeting the teen market with dual-band GSM/GPRS Linux fashion phones that feature unique snap-on ‘Smart Skins‘ themed around popular entertainers. These ‘Smart Skins‘ contain chips that interface with the phone’s processor via a serial connection, supplying the unit with ringtones, images and software specific to that skin’s particular theme.

AOL seems to be in the process of re-invigorating its AOL Wireless division. In addition to Wildseed, AOL has also recently snapped-up Tegic, a vendor of predictive text-input software for keypads, and XDrive, an Internet storage space vendor.

More details can be found at the PC Magazine article here.

[via LinuxDevices]